Beethoven & Hillborg: Chamber Works

Beethoven & Hillborg: Chamber Works is the first album on the Pentatone label from the Calder Quartet.  This recording, made at Zipper Hall at the Colburn School in Los Angeles features Jonathan Moerschel playing on a viola made by Gasparo da Salo in 1590 that is known as the “ex-Adam”. It is on generous loan from the Stradivari Society in Chicago.

Pentatone tells us "Hailed as one of the most exciting classical music groups of the United States, the Calder Quartet invites you on a journey from early to late Beethoven, passing through an exciting contemporary piece by Swedish composer Anders Hillborg along the way.

Beethoven’s Op. 131 string quartet, that concludes this album, is already a great adventure in its own right, with its seven movements full of fugal writing, harmonic explorations, variations and passages filled with operatic drama. Hearing this late masterpiece together with the much more classical, but equally lively, Op. 18 no. 3 quartet opens our ears to the exceptional richness of Beethoven’s musical universe.

Hillborg’s Kongsgaard Variations reveals unexpected sonic relationships to Beethoven’s variation technique, underlining the modernity of the older composer. This all leads to a program that is lively, layered and ravishingly beautiful."