Alinde Quintet - a new star in the chamber music heavens

At the prestigious ARD Competition in Munich in 2024, the Alinde Quintet

emerged as a dazzling new star on the chamber music scene. By that time,

they had already earned several notable prizes in London, Copenhagen,

and beyond. The players are closely associated with leading Czech and

international orchestras, including the Czech Philharmonic, the Gustav Mahler

Jugendorchester, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and the Royal Philharmonic

Orchestra. On their debut album, the quintet presents the intimate "inscapes"

of four composers. In the works of Haas and Shostakovich, the shadow of

war and Nazi ideology casts a profound, even fatal shadow on their inscapes,

while Shostakovich and Jan Novak also ran into conflict with Communist

dictatorships. Yet all of the compositions reflect distinct personal inscapes,

offering glimpses into the lives of their creators. Haas's imaginative quintet

bears the unmistakable imprint of his teacher Leos Janacek, who had died

just months before the work's completion. Shostakovich's Eighth String

Quartet (arranged by Mark A. Popkin) serves as both autobiography and

elegy - a dark, haunting inscape tinged with drama. In Peteris Vasks's

composition, an ancient Latvian funeral song intertwines with virtuosic

passages and aleatoric sections, evoking the heartrending loss of a kindred

spirit. Like a contrasting colour on a canvas, the Concertino by Jan Novak

brings the album infectious joy, playfulness, and jazzy rhythms, lending

radiant colouring to the composer's inscape, which could not be obscured

even by the dark clouds of Czechoslovakia's totalitarian regime of the 1950s.

Throughout the album, the Alinde Quintet draws on the full spectrum of

colours their instruments can offer, vividly painting each composer's inscape.