The masterly and sensitive interpretation of Memory of Florence by Tchaikovsky by the Modigliani Quartet can be found on CD and during their Parisian concert which our review presents as the unmissable event of the chamber music season.
To begin with, Tchaikovsky magnified by the Modigliani Quartet in an exceptional CD, program repeated this Tuesday in Paris in a promising concert.
Published last year under the auspices of the Mirare label, a fabulous CD brought together two of Tchaikovsky’s most sublime pieces of chamber music: the string quartet no. 3, but especially the famous string sextet baptizedMemory of Florencescore dating from 1880, revised in the evening of the composer’s life, in 1893, the same year of his death. It is this final version which is masterfully interpreted by the famous Modigliani Quartet (Amaury Coeytaux and Loïc Rio on violins, François Kieffer on cello, Laurent Marfaing on viola), which has just celebrated its quarter century of existence. This group includes two renowned instrumentalists, the cellist Antoine Lederlin and the violist Hélène Clément. The second movement adagio cantabile and with motionan absolute marvel, imbued with a nostalgia that will make you cry, is here magnified by the delicacy, the remarkably clear articulation, the smooth legato dispensed by this unique phalanx, certainly superlatively virtuoso, but without ever “overdoing it”, as they say.
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At a time when the very principle of bullfighting is being banished by our current guillotiners, offering at the opening of the concert the short, quivering bullfighter’s prayer (barely 10 minutes) composed in 1925 by Joaquin Turina (1882-1949) is a welcome counter-fire to the Philistine fire. Previous to the Florentine apotheosis, this first part of the concert also offers the one and only quartet ever written by the composer of Pelléas et Mélisandea score dedicated to colleague Ernest Chausson and in fact, in the exact aesthetic lineage of César Franck. In short, this is THE chamber concert not to be missed in this third week of May. HAS
The classical agenda also invites us to find the Modigliani Quartet in a few weeks in other places, very precisely at the Théâtre du Châtelet, where Olivier Py has, as we know, asked the pianist Shani Diluka to try to create a dialogue, according to a fairly original format, music, literature and poetry, through a program which took the name “Sunday Morning Concerts”. Thus we will find, on the last Sunday of next June, the Modigliani Quartet, this time again under the Iberian auspices of Turina, on this occasion married to the genius of Bedrich Smetana (1824-1884), with the first quartet of the great Czech composer, a famous piece that he named downright Of my life in 1876. In resonance with this romantic repertoire, the star of French Denis Podalydès will lend his voice to Nerval, Lamartine and Ibsen – an anthology of soaring poetics…
Concert : « Souvenir de Florence ».  The bullfighter’s prayer op. 34, of Joaquin Turina; Quatuor à cordes op.10, by Claude Debussy; Six of hearts Memory of Florence op. 70, about Piotr Ilitch Thaikovsky. Four Modigliani Auditorium de Radio France Tuesday, May 19, 8 p.m. Live broadcast on France Musique.
Concert, in “Concerts du Dimanche matin” :The bullfighter’s prayer op.34, by Joaquin Turina + String Quartet n°1, Of my lifeof BedÅ™ich Smetana. Four Modigliani Recitant: Denis Podalydès. Théâtre du Châtelet, Sunday June 28, 11 a.m.. Â
Dans les bacs : CD Sextuor à cordes op.70 «ÂMemory of Florence » + Quartet in strings n°3 op.30, the Tchaikovsky. Modigliani Quartet. Hélène Clément, alto. Antoine Lederlin, cello. Label Mirare, 2025. Duration : 75mn
