Antonín Dvořák: String Quartets Nos. 12 "American" & 14, Terzetto

Featuring

František Souček
Petr Střížek
Petr Holman
Vladimír Fortin
Zemlinsky Quartet
Antonín Dvořák

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Critical Reception

German ensembles showed disdain for 'The American' Quartet, seeing it as a transposition of the Slavonic Dances into the string quartet, while Czech groups regarded it as a national hymn.

Performer Biography

The Zemlinsky Quartet, founded in 1994, has won numerous top competition prizes, including the 1st Grand Prize in the Bordeaux String Quartet Competition in 2010.

Composition History

Dvořák's most famous string quartet, the 12th in F major, 'The American', was written in June 1893 in Spilville, a small Czech settlement in north-east Iowa.

Composition History

Dvořák wrote the Terzetto for two violins and viola for his new neighbors in Prague, Kruis and Pelikan, who played the violins, while Dvořák himself played the viola.

Composition History

The Quartet in A flat, Op.105, is Dvořák's last chamber music work, begun in New York and finished in Prague in two December weeks, even interrupted by a visit to Vienna.

Compositional Technique

In 'The American' Quartet, Dvořák combined elements of 'Negro music' (minor pentatonic scales, syncopated rhythms, blues phrasing) with traditional Bohemian chorale.

Instruments

František Souček, the primarius of the Zemlinsky Quartet, plays an Italian violin attributed to Nicolaus Gagliano (1776), and Petr Střížek plays a D. Nicolas de Crémone, both from the Czech State Collection.