We owe these two masterpieces to the musical friendships Mozart made during his years in Vienna. The celestial beauties of the Quintet K581 were tailor-made for the great clarinettist Anton Stadler, while the Quartet K421, more severe in tone, is one of the six Mozart dedicated to his ‘caro amico’ Joseph Haydn. Here then is the ideal programme for the four friends of the Arcanto Quartett to show their affinities with the Mozartian repertoire – for the very first time on CD.
After trying out several different chamber combinations, Antje Weithaas, Daniel Sepec, Tabea Zimmermann and Jean-Guihen Queyras founded the Arcanto Quartet in 2002. The four musicians, who in addition to their musical affinities also share a close personal friendship, attracted the attention of the musical world right from their first concert in Stuttgart in 2004. Since then the quartet has performed at all the leading concert halls, including the Beethovenhaus in Bonn, the Théâtre du Châtelet and Cité de la Musique in Paris, the Wigmore Hall in London, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Berlin Philharmonie, and the Edinburgh, Helsinki and Montreux festivals, not forgetting regular tours to Japan and North America.
Jörg Widmann studied the clarinet with Gerd Starke at the Munich Hochschule für Musik and later with Charles Neidich at the Juilliard School in New York. He regularly performs chamber music with partners including Tabea Zimmermann, Heinz Holliger, András Schiff, Christian Tetzlaff, Renaud Capuçon and Hélène Grimaud. As a soloist, he appears with major orchestras under conductors such as Christoph von Dohnányi, René Jacobs, Christoph Eschenbach and Kent Nagano. Several clarinet concertos have been dedicated to and premiered by him, notably works by Wolfgang Rihm, Aribert Reimann and Heinz Holliger. Widmann studied composition with Wolfgang Rihm and Hans Werner Henze, among others, and has won many prizes for his works. The 2012/13 season saw the premiere of his opera 'Babylon' at the Bavarian State Opera under Kent Nagano, and performances by the HRSinfonieorchester and Paavo Järvi and the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Sir Simon Rattle.
