Martin Klett together with the Armida Quartett perform late Romantic Piano Quintets by Cesar Franck and Frank Martin. "… We only have two hands, and our ten fingers are not capable of exploiting all the possibilities": that is how composer Frank Martin (1890-1974) once described the inadequacies of the keyboard. However, pianist Martin Klett and the members of the Armida Quartet view things somewhat differently. Similarly to the string quartet as a whole ensemble, the piano forms "a perfect unit in itself", Klett affirms.

In March of 1908, 27-year-old Johanna Senfter went “on a pilgrimage” to visit Max Reger in Leipzig. Having studied piano and violin at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt am Main, she now wanted to learn composition. Reger, only six years her elder, had been in charge of a masterclass for musical composition at Leipzig Royal Conservatory for only a year.

Dissonance Quartet – the name already contains the thrill of transgression. But a dissonance, in which the parts momentarily diverge from triadic harmony, is the necessary condition to achieve an aesthetic of four-part conflict, such as was sought after in the genre of classical string quartet. Mozart’s work in C Major with the “dissonance” epithet is the highlight of a group of six quartets in which he responded to the music of his colleague Joseph Haydn and the latter’s concept of discursive thematic work in a four-part texture.

With the recordings on this CD, the Armida Quartet has reached the halfway mark in a project that seeks to intimately explore an entire mountain range. Mozart’s complete works for string quartet, to which they devote intense scrutiny within the framework of a recital series that pairs them with contemporary works specifically commissioned for the occasion.