Salut Salon - Live

Since their breakthrough in 2002 in their home city of Hamburg – the headline in Welt am Sonntag proclaimed: “A quartet is born” – the four musicians of Salut Salon have swept concert audiences off their feet on all five continents, drumming up a huge fan following with more than 120 concerts annually in Europe, North and South America and Asia. Their YouTube mega-hit version of Vivaldi’s “Summer”, played as a musical competition, has attracted over 18 million views – a success any pop star would be thrilled to claim. Perhaps more than any other of today’s chamber-music ensembles, Angelika Bachmann (violin), Iris Siegfried (violin and vocals), Anne-Monika von Twardowski (piano) and Sonja Lena Schmid (cello) have found the knack of seducing the most diverse audiences with passionate virtuosity, instrumental acrobatics, irresistible charm and a great sense of fun. As Mainz’s Allgemeine Zeitung put it: “No one stirs up a stew in the genre so charmingly as Salut Salon. Their enthusiasm for extraordinary pieces is so contagious that even the biggest classical-musical dunce will become a fan.” In the jaw-dropping programme of this new Warner Classics album, Salut Salon embraces an astonishing range of styles. Listen to these musical “power women” moving effortlessly between Schumann’s Piano Quartet and tangos by Piazzolla and Lecuona’s Malagueña, while savouring arrangements of a Mendelssohn “Song without Words”, a “Meditation” from Bernstein’s Mass and the “Brahms Lullaby”; of the “Ballet of Unhatched Chicks” from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre and “Aquarium” from Carnival of the Animals; of the themes from Hitchcock’s Psycho and the German TV series Tatort. Salut Salon are redefining the very idea of chamber music. This album of “Favourites” on Warner Classics is a delight-filled introduction to the quartet’s hugely appealing new vision.