STEPHEN HOUGH (b.1961) : String Quartet No 1 'Les Six rencontres', HENRI DUTILLEUX (1916–2013) : String Quartet ‘Ainsi la nuit', MAURICE RAVEL (1875–1937) : String Quartet in F major. Takács Quartet

Description: Almost a century and a quarter lies between the oldest and the youngest work in this recording by the renowned Takács Quartet, and yet the three string quartet compositions complement each other perfectly. No wonder, since Stephen Hough's contribution - his first string quartet, by the way - was written specifically as a companion piece for the other two quartets on this CD. Hough composed his new work at the invitation of the Takács Quartet, who were seeking a companion piece for a planned recording of the quartets of Ravel and Dutilleux. In his program notes, Hough says: “It was a thrilling if daunting challenge, and it gave me an immediate idea as I considered these two colossi who strode across the length of the 20th century—not so much what united their musical languages, but what was absent from them, not to mention the missing decades between the Ravel Quartet of 1903 and Dutilleux’s Ainsi la nuit from the mid-1970s.” He goes on to explain that, for this new quartet, he was drawn to the music and aesthetic of Les Six—the famous group of six French composers most active and associated with the interwar period—as a ‘missing link’ of sorts between Ravel and Dutilleux. Regarding the flavor of Les Six’ music, Mr. Hough says: “It’s not so much a lack of seriousness, although seeing life through a burlesque lens is one recurring ingredient; rather it’s an aesthetic re-view of the world after the catastrophe of the Great War. Composers like Poulenc and Milhaud were able to discover poignance in the rough and tumble of daily human life in a way which escaped the fastidiousness of those other two composers.” The work’s subtitle, “Les Six Rencontres,” is both a reference to Les Six and to the work’s six movements, each of which is conceived as a unique, imaged ‘encounter’ (rencontre) within the cultural zeitgeist represented by Les Six, though without any direct quotation or overt musical allusion.