The String Quartet

Presented by Leo Samama.

Those who can still hear Magnard’s quartet would be surprised by the difference between that and the other string quartet from the same year, 1903. That other quartet is Maurice Ravel’s quartet. Ravel and Debussy are often linked, but Ravel is a classicist through and through, while Debussy is an anti-classicist. And neither were impressionists. Both were immersed in the cyclical structures of Franck and his students.

The only quartet that Ravel’s teacher, Gabriel Fauré, wrote at the end of his life, the String quartet in E minor (Opus 121) from 1924, is, considering the time it was written, somewhat old-fashioned. Yet it had great power of expression. You can hear a master who didn’t need to prove anything anymore.