Description
… FOUR OF THE BRIGHTEST YOUNG STARS IN CLASSICAL MUSIC TODAY. WE ARE ENJOYING ANOTHER GOLDEN ERA THANKS TO QUARTET INTEGRA.
-Martin Beaver, First Violin, Tokyo String Quartet
Quartet Integra
Executive Producer: Russell Ward
The members of this extraordinary young string quartet, Kyoka Misawa and Rintaro Kikuno on violins, Itsuki Yamamoto on viola, and cellist Ye Un Park play Classical, Romantic, Contemporary and Renaissance music equally well. The album begins with Beethoven’s last published work, String Quartet No. 16 written in 1826, his final statement in his groundbreaking series. Beethoven wrote this piece at the height of his Romantic powers, but the quartet looks back with irony. Opus 135 premiered in 1828, performed by Ignaz Schuppanzigh and his famous ensemble, a year after Beethoven died.
Next, Quartet Integra tackles Ligeti’s 1968 ground-breaking String Quartet No. 2. Kyoka, Rintaro, Itsuki and Ye Un find beauty and repose in this seat-belts-required 20-minute work full of extended techniques and mid-20th-Century sound world while communicating humor and transcendent energy. Kyoka said “When people hear the name Ligeti, many tend to associate it with contemporary music and assume it will be difficult to listen to. But in reality, that’s not the case. Especially the String Quartet No. 2, which we’re performing this time — it’s wild and destructive, yet it holds a kind of breathtaking beauty. It feels almost like watching a movie.” Mike Wechsberg, an audience member at our special live concert recording session commented heartily how “Ligeti is not the sort of music I normally like, but THIS was magnificent! Bravo Quartet Integra!”
We ended the concert with Green Mountains, Now Black, a new piece by David S. Lefkowitz. The work quotes Monteverdi’s earliest extant opera Orfeo and additional passages from The Coronation of Poppea, including its magical and ever-so recognizable love duet between Poppea and the emperor Nero. Instead of merely transposing my favorite arias, choral passages and this famous duet for string quartet, David wrote a work that explores the very nature of what it means to be a string quartet. And he experiments with the genre, pushes boundaries, and incorporates his own despair witnessing the burning of much of Los Angeles in the spring of 2025. David and his wife Laurie could see flames and smoke not too far away from their home as he composed this work. Nero himself famously allowed a good chunk of downtown Rome to burn, exercising (and bragging about) his dubious leadership in the process. David layers Octavia’s farewell to her beloved city with the giddy love duet between Octavia’s husband, the emperor, and his mistress Poppea, to tell the story of David’s own distress while writing the piece. Green Mountains, Now Black not only refer to Monteverdi himself (Green Mountain) but the fire which turned so many of our spring green mountains to char in Los Angeles. Despite David’s gloom and worry during our fires, his iridescent string writing shows itself proudly and his many glorious and lyrical passages outnumber the darker ones.
The Quartet has been lauded as the most exciting ensemble to emerge from Japan (and Ye Un from Korea) since the famous Tokyo String Quartet formed in 1969 at Juilliard. I love a certain symmetry here: two of the non-Japanese born musicians playing as members of the Tokyo String Quartet were Yarlung Special Advisor Martin Beaver, who became principal violin in 2002, and Clive Greensmith, who joined Tokyo as cellist in 1999. Both Martin and Clive performed with the Tokyo Quartet until the ensemble gave their final concerts in 2013, and now Martin and Clive co-direct Chamber Music at Colburn School and have mentored the four members of Quartet Integra. Before their Colburn residency, Quartet Integra won a four-year fellowship with Suntory Hall’s Chamber Music Academy where they were coached by Tokyo Quartet members Koichiro Harada, Kikuei Ikeda and Kazuhide Isomura. This is generational integrity and communication worthy of Kyoka, Rintaro, Itsuki and Ye Un.
-Bob Attiyeh, producer
Repertoire:
- Beethoven String Quartet No. 16 in F Major, Op. 135
- Gyorgy Ligeti String Quartet No. 2
- David S. Lefkowitz: Green Mountains, Now Black
Recording Engineers: Bob Attiyeh and Arian Jansen
Mastering Engineers: Steve Hoffman, Arian Jansen and Bob Attiyeh
Yarlung Microphone Preamplification: Elliot Midwood
AKG C24 microphone: Ancona Audio
SoundCloud
YouTube
Quartet
Quartet Integra concert recording sessions
Beethoven:
Lefkowitz:
Ruston Paul –
Dr. David W. Robinson kindly allows us to publish articles from his magazine Positive Feedback on the Yarlung Records site. This article arrived from Rush Paul on the day of this album’s release, so thank you Rush and thank you David! https://positive-feedback.com/reviews/music-reviews/yarlung-pure-dsd256-integra-quartet/
An Exciting New Release from Yarlung Records in Pure DSD256 with Quartet Integra Performing Beethoven, Ligeti, and Lefkowitz. Russell Ward, Executive Producer
Whenever I get to hear something that is so supremely good, and so delightfully performed, with such insight and richness, I feel it warrants a immediate sharing with you. This new Yarlung Records Pure DSD256 album, released today, is such a recording. Can you tell I’m excited about it? Yes, indeed! You need to hear this.
Bob Attiyeh and Yarlung Records return with a superb new Pure DSD256 recording. This time he shares with us an excellent recital performance by Quartet Integra, recorded in April 2025 at the end of their three year residency in Los Angeles. Bob tells us they had just returned from acclaimed performances in Wigmore Hall in London, and they left again after the recording for summer concerts (and a little bit of family time) in Asia before moving to Paris and Hannover in the autumn.
Kyoka Misawa and Rintaro Kikuno on violins, Itsuki Yamamoto on viola, and cellist Ye Un Park—bring astonishing versatility and depth to these performances. The album opens with Beethoven’s final String Quartet No. 16 in F Major Op 135, premiered after the composer’s death, and continues with a captivating performance of Ligeti’s ground breaking 1968 String Quartet No. 2, an explosive yet unexpectedly beautiful work. The program concludes with David S. Lefkowitz’s Green Mountains, Now Black, a richly layered new work composed in 2025 in response to the composer’s emotional response to the 2025 Los Angeles fires.
In all three works, the Quartet Integra bring a depth of insight surprising for a group of musicians so relatively young. They have been described “as the most exciting young quartet to emerge from Japan (with Ye Un from Korea) since the storied Tokyo String Quartet” and listening to these performances without prejudgment will tell you why. Their intensive training at Suntory Hall’s Chamber Music Academy has served them well as they perform with a degree of refinement, combined with power and energy, that is most gratifying to hear.
As usual, Bob Attiyeh has made parallel recordings to both 15ips reel-to-reel tape and to Pure DSD256 using his Merging Technologies HAPI D/A converter. I have been listening to the Pure DSD256 release from NativeDSD that was mixed and mastered entirely in the DSD domain (Direct Mixed) by Tom Caulfield from the DSD256 tracks.
…only a single stereo pair of microphones was used to make this recording, Ted Ancona’s AKG C24 microphone previously owned by Frank Sinatra, and Yarlung Audio vacuum tube microphone amplification designed and built by Elliot Midwood.
As Frans de Rond (Sound Liason recording engineer and founder) observed in a recent blog post, “One of the biggest technical challenges in multi-mic recording is phase interference. When multiple microphones pick up the same sound source at slightly different times, those signals can combine in unpredictable ways. Some frequencies cancel out, others are boosted, and the result can be a smearing or hollowing of the sound. Engineers spend countless hours adjusting placement, polarity, distance, and delay to minimize these effects.
“With one microphone, none of that is an issue. There are no competing arrival times between microphones, only the natural timing and spacing of the instruments themselves. The phase coherence is simply built into the physical world. What you hear is stable, focused, and true.”
And this is so very true of this one microphone recording from Yarlung Records. The image is as rock-solid as anything you will ever hear. And that superb focus of sound created a recording that is very special. The sound is vibrant, direct, absolutely transparent, with superb detail resolution and sound stage imaging. As always, no compression was applied. It is, altogether, a remarkable recording of a set of outstanding performances.
Bob Attiyeh –
Rush, it makes us so happy that your golden ears like this performance and sound.
Rush Paul –
Bob, this is the most true-to-life recording of a string quartet that I’ve ever heard (and I’ve listened to a bunch of them 😉).