Journeys

Sony Classical is proud to announce the release of the label’s second recording by the Emerson String Quartet, winner of nine Grammy® Awards and three Gramophone Awards. Called Journeys, the disc consists of two string sextets from the 1890's, Souvenir de Florence by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) by Arnold Schoenberg. The Quartet is joined by two frequent collaborators, both acclaimed soloists and chamber musicians, American violist Paul Neubauer and British cellist Colin Carr.

Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence, written in 1890, owes its title to the fact that the main theme of its slow movement was conceived while the composer was staying in Florence. The work is notable for its combination of warm Italianate lyricism and Germanic rigour with Russian dance and song.

Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, written in 1899 and the composer’s first important work, is recognised as a masterpiece of late Romanticism. Unusually for a chamber piece, it is a symphonic poem, inspired by a poem by Richard Dehmel. A man and a woman are walking through a wood at night. The woman confesses that she is bearing the child of a man she does not love. The man tells her that the glory of the night, and the warmth that exists between them, will transfigure the child, and make it his own.

This is the Emerson String Quartet’s first recording since the 1980s of anything by Tchaikovsky, and its first of Schoenberg. Philip Setzer, one of the two interchanging violinists of the Quartet, says that the starting-point in planning the disc was the wish to do “something collaborative”; his violinist colleague Eugene Drucker describes the sonority of the string sextet as “richer, more grounded, deeper” than that of the quartet. Philip Setzer recalls that, when he was looking for a possible companion piece for Verklärte Nacht, “it jumped out at me that the Tchaikovsky had been written in the same decade”.