Last year, the thoroughly original Epoque Quartet was marking twenty-five years on the music scene. A multi-genre ensemble straddling the borderlines of classical, jazz, pop, contemporary forms, gypsy music and all types of crossover idioms, has markedly expanded the scope of the category of “string quartet”.

Birth is a composition by a similarly multitalented musician, pianist, composer, arranger and conductor (plus also a painter), Jan Kučera. It was originally part of incidental music for a production named The 13^th Month, staged by the dance ensemble Spitfire Company. The music of Birth evolves along a minimalist, pulsating rhythmic line, with the occasional momentaneous intrusion of a simple, drawn melodic line.

The American cellist, arranger and composer, Alan Shulman, used to play in the NBC Symphony Orchestra in the era of Arturo Toscanini, as a founding member of the Stuyvesant String Quartet performed US premieres of various masterpieces of 20^th-century music, and made a name for himself as an arranger in tv and radio music productions. His own compositions are influenced by jazz as well as by Jewish music. The Rendezvous for Clarinet and Strings was written for the legendary clarinettist of the swing era, Benny Goodman.

Alexey Aslamas is likewise a musician steeped equally well in classical and jazz music. He is a sought-after arranger working with various pop vocalists, and writes his own music. The charmingly sentimental ballad, Rain Again, is one of his pieces written for Irvin Venyš and Epoque Quartet.

Kukačky, by the contemporary composer of both classical and pop music, Petr Wajsar, is a jazz-style improvisation focused on a theme reminiscent of the Lachrimosa part from Mozart’s Requiem. In terms of style on the other hand, it bears a good deal of affinity with the time-tested standard, Douce Ambience, by the French protagonist of “gypsy jazz”, guitarist Django Reinhardt.

In its turn, Cimpoiasca is a fast Moldavian traditional dance. Miroslav Kolacia initially arranged it for clarinet and cymbalom band, and later produced a new version for string quartet.

The instrumental combination of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Concerto for Piano, Trumpet and Strings, from 1933, is fairly unorthodox. The composer’s original intention was to write a concerto for solo trumpet, but as work on it progressed he reconsidered and the resulting score assigns to each solo instrument an equal share. The virtuoso piano part evokes the fact that long before becoming a noted symphonist, Shostakovich would occasionally stand in as a silent film live piano accompanist.

Text: Dita Hradecká