After a first volume praised by the press, including an Editor’s Choice in Gramophone, the Quatuor Van Kuijk concludes its complete recording of Mendelssohn’s string quartets with op.44 nos. 2 and 3 and the Quartet op.80, which bears the mark of the sudden death in 1847 of his sister Fanny, to whom he was very close, at the age of only forty-two. As Stéphane Goldet writes in the booklet: ‘The act of resistance that is the Quartet op.80, written in a single burst during the summer of 1847, its overwhelming “No, not that, not her!” shouted by four instruments for twenty-five minutes, was to be the composer’s last completed work. The four movements of this “confrontation with grief” (Bernard Fournier) in F minor are to be played con dolore, although that marking never appears in the score.’ She goes on to quote Brigitte François-Sappey: ‘This “Requiem for Fanny” might be called “Death and the Young Woman”. As in Schubert’s last two quartets, the strings shiver in tremolos over ostinato pedals, like death knells.’

The Quatuor Van Kuijk celebrates the tenth anniversary of its creation and its sixth recording for Alpha with a complete set of Mendelssohn’s quartets, of which this is the first volume: it opens with the Quartet op.13, composed in 1827, when he was only eighteen years old. ‘A trial run? No, a masterstroke! In every movement of this first quartet, we are constantly aware that the sense of urgency is the blood that runs through its veins. Never before have we heard such tension maintained over an entire quartet’, writes Stéphane Goldet in the album’s booklet notes.

As in its Schubert recording in 2018, the Quatuor van Kuijk likes to delve into a composer’s youthful output and then measure his evolution by confronting it with his mature works. Hence, after recording two of Mozart’s early string quartets in 2016, the French group, here joined by violist Adrien La Marca, voted ‘Revelation’ at the Victoires de la Musique Classique in 2014, now offers the String Quintets K515 and K516. These two large-scale works dominate Mozart’s instrumental output in the year 1787, which ended with the premiere of Don Giovanni. They show us a composer at the height of his creative powers, in a genre to which he had not returned for fourteen years and which he here brought to a high degree of formal perfection.

The first disc of the quartet founded by Nicolas Van Kuijk, a programme of Mozart, was awarded a ‘Choc de Classica’ and ‘Diapason Découverte’. Now they return to their roots with key works from the French repertory: the single quartets of Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy and the Chanson perpétuelle of Ernest Chausson, in which they are accompanied by the mezzosoprano Kate Lindsey, who recently joined Alpha, and the pianist Alphonse Cemin, also well-known on the label.

The Quatuor Van Kuijk gives these works all their youthful impetuosity. The quartet is already a BBC New Generation Artist, having won First Prize and the Haydn and Beethoven Prizes at the Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competition, and First Prize and the Audience Prize at the Trondheim International String Quartet Competition. It has just joined the roster of ECHO Rising Star artists for the 2017-18 season.

Despite its Dutch-sounding name, the quartet founded by Nicolas Van Kuijk in 2012 is French. But its short career is already international. The Quatuor Van Kuijk won First Prize in the 2015 Wigmore Hall Competition and First Prize and Audience Award at the Trondheim International Chamber Competition, and its members have been named BBC New Generation Artists until 2017. It has also been distinguished by the Academy of the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, and it is in the framework of the latter’s partnership with Alpha Classics that it has recorded this programme. Mozart is obviously the ideal composer to forge a link between chamber music and opera, the raison d’être of the Aix Festival. This programme combines an impish divertimento by the youthful Mozart of 1772 with two mature quartets composed around 1782, including the famous ‘Dissonance’ Quartet with its eminently dramatic opening. Nowhere else in Mozart’s quartets do theatre and counterpoint form such a happy pairing. Praised by The Guardian for its ‘style, energy, and a sense of risk’, the QVK is one of the most promising chamber groups of the new generation. Alpha is proud to accompany it for several recording projects.