An interview with Hannah Sloane

What was your starting point for this album?

Our first violinist, Beatrice

Philips, is the artistic director of the Lewes Chamber Music Festival and she did a whole Second Viennese School festival in 2018. The Korngold Second String Quartet sort of snuck in and we just absolutely loved it. We had never heard anything like it, really, so we recorded it ourselves later that year.

The Piano Quintet makes for a dazzling opener…

The writing is so amazing and the score is full of these long, German instructions like ‘Imperceptibly faster but not too much faster, but now rushed’. It was fantastic to work on it with Alasdair Beatson. We had played it with him in 2018, so it was brilliant to revisit it. One thing that was really great about this project was that, because it happened at such a strange time, we had a lot of time to rehearse. We spent a good week exploring the piece in detail. What can you tell us about the new arrangement you premiere on the album?

We were searching for a piece for the middle and Hannah Shaw, our violist, unearthed this quartet transcription that Korngold made of his Op. 11. We really liked it, but Bea felt that the most glorious bit is the Intermezzo, which wasn’t arranged. It was clear to us that we wanted it to be for piano quintet, rather than for quartet. Perhaps it would have been natural to have done a quartet arrangement, because that’s what the other three pieces were, but we wanted that luscious sweep.

Hannah Sloane is the Eusebius Quartet’s cellist