Love and Death

Cleverly built around two great string quartets written almost exactly a century apart—Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” and Janáček’s “Kreutzer Sonata”—this album explores the ever-relevant themes of love and death, and does so with great imagination. Those two pillars of the quartet repertoire are beautifully brought to life by the Navarra String Quartet, their individual intensity nicely gauged—the Schubert full of song, the Janáček febrile and nervy. In between come a couple of exquisite miniatures by Kurtág, Puccini’s lovely “Crisantemi,” which elicits the flowers at an Italian funeral, and Turina’s powerful evocation of a bullfighter confronting his mortality.