Quatuor Diotima: American Music

"Quatuor Diotima, an expert and intriguing young French group devoted to music from both the Romantic and modern eras, takes on [Samuel Barber's] String Quartet in a compelling new release, 'American Music' (on Naive). (The cover, a provocation, is a Stanley Kubrick photograph of a cocked gun.) The work has always been problematic, with a third movement that is little more than an abbreviated recollection of the first. The Diotima solves that by letting the mournful spirit and elastic linearity of the second part -- the original version of the ubiquitous Adagio for Strings -- soak outward to the movements that precede and follow it. It is a solution as satisfying as it is radical -- which places Barber's proudly conservative piece in fine company with the two other American classics on the disk, Steve Reich's 'Different Trains' and George Crumb's 'Black Angels'" (Russell Platt, "Classical Notes," New Yorker, 6/4 & 11, 2012).
See also: "barbershop quartet"

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