The Fresk Quartet – The Complete Caprice Recordings

The Fresk Quartet was officially formed in 1965 by four fellow students at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, and was hired only two years later by the state music organiser Concert Sweden, which laid the foundation for a long and successful career with many concert tours in Sweden, Europe and North America. They were also active pedagogues at school and “outreach” concerts, or as the music journalist Per-Anders Hellqvist put it in typical 1970s fashion in the booklet of an EP single:

They give old-fashioned, solemn concerts occasionally, but they are just as likely to sit like a group of folk singers in the circle of people at a trade union meeting, in a workshop, in a hospital corridor, or in a classroom.

The Fresk Quartet, photo: Per B. Adolphson.

Based on that account, they can easily be mistaken for rough-hewn amateurs, but on the contrary – the Fresk Quartet is widely known for its refined interplay, brilliant technique, and deep expressiveness. Not a single note is wasted, even when the music’s tempo seems to demand it.

This collection features music that shows the quartet’s enormous breadth as both main artists and background musicians, in everything from Dmitri Shostakovich‘s thouroughly dark String Quartet No. 8, Torbjörn Lillieqvist‘s imaginative children’s music, Allan Pettersson‘s spiky Concerto for Violin and String Quartet with Karl-Ove Mannberg on the solo part, quartets by Wilhelm Stenhammar, Béla Bartók, and Hilding Rosenberg, to the pastoral song by and with Elisabet Hermodsson where “the Fresks” participate.

This collection is exclusively digital and is available on all major digital platforms (and many of the smaller ones!) for streaming and download.

Cover motif: Midjourney AI
Producer & graphic design: Erik Hamrefors