Esmé Quartet - Yessori: Sound From The Past - Mozart, Tchaikovsky & Lyuh (2023)

The ‘Dissonance’ Quartet is probably the best-known of the set of six Mozart wrote between 1782 and 1785 as a tribute to Haydn. It owes its nickname to the strange clashes of the slow introduction in C minor. Almost a century later, the thirty-year-old Tchaikovsky wrote his Quartet no.1, op.11, whose second movement, which moved Tolstoy to tears, was inspired by a folk tune that the composer heard a housepainter whistling. The musicians of the Esmé Quartet chose these two pieces because they love their respective Andante cantabile movements. The four young women also decided to put the spotlight on one of their compatriots, the South Korean composer Soo Yeon Lyuh, who in 2016 wrote Yessori, ‘sound from the past’, for the Kronos Quartet. She explains: ‘I first got used to playing the piano and the violin. So, later, when I encountered Korean traditional music, its relative pitch relationships and fluid rhythmic cycles felt completely new.’

Tracklist
01. Mozart: String Quartet No.19 in C Major, K.465: I. Adagio - Allegro
02. Mozart: String Quartet No.19 in C Major, K.465: II. Andante cantabile
03. Mozart: String Quartet No.19 in C Major, K.465: III. Menuetto and Trio. Allegro
04. Mozart: String Quartet No.19 in C Major, K.465: IV. Allegro
05. Tchaikovsky: String Quartet No.1, Op.11: I. Moderato e simplice
06. Tchaikovsky: String Quartet No.1, Op.11: II. Andante cantabile
07. Tchaikovsky: String Quartet No.1, Op.11: III. Scherzo. Allegro non tanto e con fuoco
08. Tchaikovsky: String Quartet No.1, Op.11: IV. Finale. Allegro giusto
09. Lyuh: Yessori (Sound from the past)