Cuarteto Casals

When composing the six quartets of Op. 20, Joseph Haydn was gripped by a particularly strong desire to experiment. He borrowed ideas from earlier eras, e.g. fugue themes, but also opened the door towards Romanticism. One or two of the movements in his »Sun Quartets« sound as if they could have been composed by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy.

And the Cuarteto Casals musicians are more than happy to facilitate a comparison with Mendelssohn – by performing his lively String Quartet in D Major. Between those two works they perform Dmitri Shostakovich’s C Major Quartet of 1938. Shostakovich began engaging with the string quartet genre relatively late, after he had already completed several symphonies and operas. His first work sounds nimbler and more classical than many of his later ones. Did the composer already suspect back then that quartet composition would become one of his most important forms of creative output?