Quatuor Diotima

In early 2014, Quatuor Diotima came up with an ambitious project. This French ensemble’s intention is to record on CD the complete string quartet oeuvre of the Second Viennese School on the Naïve record label. This also includes Schoenberg’s Third String Quartet, a pioneering work in which this Viennese master first unleashed his brand new twelve-tone technique on the sixteen strings of a quartet.
In his ‘Livre pour quatuor’, Pierre Boulez also conjures with series and parameters. This Parisian composer was barely twenty-five in 1949 when he put down his double bar lines, and was absolutely convinced that serious Western music had to take a completely different direction. This makes ‘Livre pour quatuor’ an iconoclastic work in which a modernism that took no prisoners entered into a magical alliance with abstract sensuality.
Beethoven had already shown in the 1820s that the quartet was perfectly suited to the exploration of new horizons. His monumental Fourteenth is a sample of his compositional skills. It is not without reason that Beethoven found this to be one of the best quartets he had ever written.