On this album the Rosamunde Quartett records the string quartet version of Joseph Haydn's The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross. Haydn wrote the work as instrumental music for the Good Friday devotions in Cádiz, first for orchestra, and arranged it himself for quartet so that it could circulate more widely. It remains one of the hardest tests in the quartet repertoire, nine slow-burning movements with almost no fast music, and the Rosamunde reading was widely received as a reference.
The Munich quartet was founded in 1992 by violinists Andreas Reiner and Simon Fordham, violist Helmut Nicolai and cellist Anja Lechner, and from 1997 recorded only for ECM New Series. Before this disc they had worked with the bandoneonist Dino Saluzzi on Kultrum. The Haydn was recorded in May 2000 at the Festeburgkirche in Frankfurt am Main, produced by Manfred Eicher with Markus Heiland as engineer, and the booklet essay is by Uwe Schweikert.
The work opens with an Introduzione marked Maestoso ed Adagio, followed by seven sonatas, each built on one of Christ's sayings from the cross and marked Largo, Grave, Adagio or Lento. Only the closing Il Terremoto, Presto e con tutta la forza, breaks the slow pulse in under two minutes. The quartet plays with a pared-down tone and sparing vibrato, giving weight to the rests and the long, measured tread of the music. The second sonata, Grave e cantabile, and the fourth, a Largo in F minor, show the range of colour they find within that restraint.
In The Strad, David Denton praised an interpretation "perfectly capturing the devotional gravity the work requires". Rob Cowan in Gramophone listed its virtues as "variety and refinement of tone, internal clarity, historical awareness, imagination". Klassik Heute called it a reference recording, while Richard Wigmore in BBC Music Magazine found it stressed the music's monumentality over its anguish. Their other ECM albums include music by Valentin Silvestrov, Tigran Mansurian and Thomas Larcher, and the group disbanded in 2009.
This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 1756, first released in May 2001.
