Schoenberg, Berg , Webern: String Quartets - CD

ENGLISH

<br><br>For many years the recordings of the complete string quartets of Schoenberg by the LaSalle Quartet were the top recommendation of the critics. The La Salles made a speciality of the music of the Second Viennese School, recording Berg and Webern, as well as Zemlinsky. Their repertoire also extended to composers such as Ligeti and Nono.<br /> <br /> On this 4CD set it is possible to experience the musical transition from the late romantic age to the atonal style that Schoenberg pioneered. His earliest quartet, the D minor of 1899, shows him to be well-versed in the chamber music of Dvorak – as well-versed as the young Beethoven was exactly a hundred years earlier in the music of Mozart and Haydn when he wrote his First Symphony. As with Beethoven, Schoenberg soon<br /> found that having an ability to assimilate the styles of your predecessors was not enough. The First quartet started him on the path that would lead to works as revolutionary as Beethoven’s Third Symphony was in the century before. The last three quartets are mature Schoenberg – uncompromising, searching, but still evidently indebted to Beethoven and Brahms.<br /> <br /> His pupils, Berg and Webern, also produced major repertoire for the string quartet. The Lyric Suite of Berg draws upon quotations from Zemlinsky’s lyric Symphony and Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde – the work that provided the catalyst for the Second Viennese School.<br /> <br /> ‘To see a world in a grain of sand’ wrote William Blake. This could well apply to Webern, who had the ability to distil music down to its purest essence. Telescoping, or compressing the material for a 30-minute work into just a few minutes. From the tiny musical cells that comprise much of his work, intense and complicated sounds emerge. Minimalist in terms of scale, but huge in content and weight.<br /> <br /> Other information:<br /> - Top quality sound, recorded in 1968-70.<br /> - Includes booklet essay.<br /> - Landmark critically acclaimed recordings of this repertoire make a welcome return to the catalogue.