Antonín Dvořák
String Quartet No. 13 in G major, Op. 106

Dvořák returned to his beloved Czechoslovakia in 1895 after three homesick years in America. He was ‘inexpressibly happy’ to be home and this joyful quartet was written a few months later. It is at times wildly exuberant and at others profoundly meditative, and includes one of the most beautiful slow movements in the repertoire.

Anton Arensky
Quartet No. 2 in A minor Op. 35 for violin, viola and two cellos

Russian composer Arensky dedicated this late Romantic quartet ‘to the memory of Tchaikovsky’, his friend and mentor who had died a year earlier in 1893. Arensky chose the unusual scoring of violin, viola and two cellos to emphasize the dark sonority of the work. The music alludes to the Russian Orthodox funeral chant as well as to celebratory Russian folksong.

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