Centaur CRC 2069

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"If you doubt that Ives the experimenter was also a gifted craftsman, listen to the First String Quartet, written when he was a sophomore at Yale. The opening movement, a stately fugue with a theme adapted from ''Missionary Hymn,'' is impressively wrought. The whole quartet abounds with imagination and hints of what was to come. The performance to have is the Lydian String Quartet's, recorded in 1988, on a rewarding disc that includes a bracing account of the more mature and out-there Second Quartet." Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times

"This is one of the great string quartet recordings, catching the Lydian Quartet in its recent prime in music it feels in the marrow of its bones. The CD also seems to be the first to contain the complete music for string quartet by Charles Ives, which means that two short pieces called Hymn and Hallowe'en complete the two canonical quartets. The only possible response to this CD was to play it all over again. And again." Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe

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