String Quartets

TRIFOLIUM

This recording allows us to dispel the myth of Luigi Boccherini as a composer of light, gallant or even superficial works, and introduces us to deeper facets of his writing, aligned with the Central European Sturm und Drang aesthetic and musical currents. Luigi Boccherini is a pivotal, albeit controversial, figure in Spanish music history. On the one hand, his birth in Lucca in Italy marginalized him from the discourses with a nationalist tinge expounded by Spanish musicologists of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, despite the fact that most of his life and career were spent under the wing of Spanish instutitions. Traditional historiography has considered Joseph Haydn the inventor of two instrumental genres of great importance in all later music: the symphony and the string quartet. The supposed invention, which in reality consisted of the adoption of the local Viennese style as a universal model of composition, helped to establish a German-centric canon that considered all other composing traditions, like the style of Boccherini, as inferior. Fortunately, many musicologists have studied various aspects of the life and work of Boccherini, offering a revised image of the composer. This historiographical revision, together with the elaboration of the definitive edition of his works, brings evidence of the high quality and depth of his music and contradicts the idea of the isolation that Boccherini supposedly suffered in Spain.

Price: $25.98