 At the prestigious ARD Competition in Munich in 2024, the Alinde Quintet emerged as a dazzling new star on the chamber music scene. By that time, they had already earned several notable prizes in London, Copenhagen, and beyond. The players are closely associated with leading Czech and international orchestras, including the Czech Philharmonic, the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. On their debut album, the quintet presents the intimate “inscapes” of four composers. In the works of Haas and Shostakovich, the shadow of war and Nazi ideology casts a profound, even fatal shadow on their inscapes, while Shostakovich and Jan Novák also ran into conflict with Communist dictatorships. Yet all of the compositions reflect distinct personal inscapes, offering glimpses into the lives of their creators. Haas’s imaginative quintet bears the unmistakable imprint of his teacher Leoš Janácek, who had died just months before the work’s completion. Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet (arranged by Mark A. Popkin) serves as both autobiography and elegy – a dark, haunting inscape tinged with drama. In Peteris Vasks’s composition, an ancient Latvian funeral song intertwines with virtuosic passages and aleatoric sections, evoking the heartrending loss of a kindred spirit. Like a contrasting colour on a canvas, the Concertino by Jan Novák brings the album infectious joy, playfulness, and jazzy rhythms, lending radiant colouring to the composer’s inscape, which could not be obscured even by the dark clouds of Czechoslovakia’s totalitarian regime of the 1950s. Throughout the album, the Alinde Quintet draws on the full spectrum of colours their instruments can offer, vividly painting each composer’s inscape.
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