Haydn: The Complete String Quartets

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Haydn: The Complete String Quartets is a 20-disc box set released on June 5, 2026 by Hyperion Records, compiled to mark the 25th anniversary of the London Haydn Quartet. The set br ings together all of the ensemble's individual Haydn quartet recordings made between 2007 and 2023, spanning the composer's mature output from Op. 9 through to Op. 77, Op. 42, and the string quartet arrangement of The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross, Op. 51. Presented as 10 elegant double-disc packages adorned with maritime paintings by the 18th-century artist Samuel Scott — the so-called "English Canaletto" — many of the packages also include reproductions of original scores and title pages, and the set is accompanied by a 52-page booklet collecting all of Richard Wigmore's scholarly liner essays from across the individual releases, along with a digital edition of the same.The London Haydn Quartet — comprising violinists Catherine Manson and Michael Gurevich, violist John Crockatt, and cellist Alice Neary — perform throughout on period instruments, drawing on original published editions of each opus rather than modern scholarly editions. This historically informed approach was praised extensively across the course of the recording project: Gramophone applauded "their fantasy, their disciplined spontaneity and their cumulative insights," while Classic FM called an early installment "without a doubt one of the all-time great Haydn quartet recordings," citing the ensemble's "deep feeling, dynamic subtlety and phrasal sensitivity." Haydn is widely regarded as the father of the string quartet form — Mozart famously dedicated six of his own quartets to him — and this box set stands as one of the most comprehensive period-instrument traversals of a repertoire that, in the quartet's hands, unfolds as a continuous record of the genre's invention and maturation. Show more