Quatuor Girard - Beethoven: Quatuor No. 2, Op. 59 - Hersant: Quatuor No. 4 " The Starry Sky" (2018) [Hi-Res]

Word Premier Recording - Fourth Quartet "The Starry Sky"The title of Philippe Hersant's 4th Quartet, The Starry Sky immediately informs the listener that this piece alludes to Beethoven, since the starry sky is an emblematic Beethovenian topos. It appears in the following quote by Kant "the moral law within us and the starry sky above our heads" which Beethoven wrote in his personal journal in 1820 (aphorism No. 146). It is explicitly or implicitly present in many of his pieces, such as the song Abendlied Unterm gestirnten Himmel (Evening Song under the Starry Sky) and in the slow movement of his Eighth Quartet, Opus 59 No. 2 which, according to one of Beethoven's confessions to Schindler, would be a "meditation under the starry sky". Perhaps it is not a coincidence that these two pages are written in the key of E major, which Beethoven seemed to consider a mystical key.