The Modigliani Quartet presents a program of youthful works by three great musical prodigies. The works assembled here came straight from the hearts of their seventeen-year-old composers. In his sixth quartet, Mozart's prodigious maturity is expressed in pre-Romantic music that shifts from laughter to tears in the blink of an eye. Schubert's fourth quartet comes from a time in the composer's career when he was just forming his own personal style. Possessing the same key and formal structure, it is clearly inspired by Mozart's 'Dissonance' quartet. Arriaga, the 'Spanish Mozart,' died at age twenty, three years after the composition of his third quartet. In it, Romantic freshness mixes comfortably with Classical formality. To explain the inspiration for this album the group said, "All four of us realized, in playing through these works, that the sincerest tribute we could pay their three marvelous composers would be to allow ourselves to be guided by the sublime intuition they possessed at this moment in their lives."
