Les Dissonances Quartet

Since a memorable cycle of Janáček quartets in 2015, we’ve not seen the Dissonances Quartet in Dijon. Of the six masterpieces in Joseph Haydn’s op. 76, the Quartet n°4 is without doubt the most radiant. It owes its nickname to the effect that opens its first movement, in which a particularly lyrical main theme emerges like the dawn as the sun breaks over the horizon. Ten years later, Beethoven would apply the full measure of his genius to this most difficult of genres. His Seventh quartet op. 59 n°1 sounds like a chamber music version of his “Eroica” symphony: a personal and original expression that broadens in a stroke the universe into which it penetrates. Bartók’s Second Quartet also marks the conquest of new territories of expression, conjugating a lyricism bordering on the romantic, with the sonic expressionism that erupts so dazzlingly in The Miraculous Mandarin.