Search - Hyacinthe Jadin, Louis-Emmanuel Jadin, Quatuor Mosaiques :: Hyacinthe & Louis-Emmanuel Jadin: Trois quatuors

A great loss to music

Heruvo | Canada | 07/19/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"It is a travesty that this wonderful music is now all but forgotten.



The two quartets written by scarcely 20-year old Hyacinthe Jadin in Paris, perhaps slightly earlier than Haydn's Op 76 and a few years before Beethoven started working his Op 18 quartets, are quartets in the true sense of the word. Hyacinthe used earlier Haydn and Mozart quartets as his models and all four voices share thematic material in dense part writing. Counterpoint dialogue and chromatic interest are key elements. The Op 2 No 1 quartet has an introduction as interesting and even more dissonant than Mozart's K465 of a decade earlier. The three higher voices weave contrapuntally first on decending pedal notes in the cello; then consonance seems to be gradually increasing on an extended pedal note, finally resolving after close to two minutes into the movement. These are terrific quartets, fully equal to the models they were based on (dare I say they challenge Beethoven's yet-to-be-written Op 18 quartets). They are superbly performed by Quatuor Mosaïques in their characteristic period interpretation. This disk is highly recommended for Hyacinthe's brilliant quartets. (Hyacinthe managed to write 12 quartets before his death from tuberculosis at age 24 - a great loss to music).



The quartet by older brother Louis-Emmanuel dating some fifteen years later, while pleasing enough to listen to, is far less interesting as a composition with all the interest going to the first violin, duly accompanied by the others."