The Dudok Quartet Amsterdam completes its two volume project of recording Tchaikovsky’s complete String Quartets on gut strings with this new release, featuring the posthumous Quartet Movement in B-flat and the Third String Quartet.

When the artists told their coach Dmitri Ferschtman, a pioneer in historically informed performance practice, that they wanted to perform Tchaikovsky on gut strings, he asked: isn’t this music already difficult enough to play with a modern setup? The quartet argued that there is a raw naturalness to the sound together with an intimacy steel strings cannot match. Ferschtman’s final verdict was, with a sense of understatement: “I must say: it sounded considerably less terrible than I was expecting!”

The Dudok’s arrangements of four of the solo piano works from Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons round off this album.