Customer Reviews

Arnold Schoenberg 2: String Quartets 1-4 - Arditti String Quartet / Dawn Upshaw

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I love these quartets, and I listen to them for their deep beauty. This recording is such an important part of my collection that I am buying a second copy because there is a skip on the second CD (from careless handling... sigh). Regarding denisdiderot's comments, I offer in rebuttal the following quote, from "Schoenberg the Romantic"

"On the surface, most of his music appears to be a complete departure from anything previously written, utilizing bizarre harmonies, unresolving dissonances, extreme dynamics, and disjunct melodies. However, a closer look reveals that not only does Schoenberg cling to the musical ideals of the Romantic era, but also that his predecessors, including Brahms, Wagner, Mahler, Strauss, and even Beethoven, already had begun to develop the stylistic techniques which Schoenberg's audiences found so shocking. Schoenberg took these beginnings of a style, which later became known as expressionism, and simply brought them to their logical conclusion by destroying tonality. In the period between the destruction of tonality and the development of the twelve-tone method, Schoenberg created works which look to Romantic ideals for their structure, yet which deny one of the most important parts of this Romantic structure, tonality, since he thought Wagner had exhausted the possibilities of tonality in Tristan and Isolde."

It's really difficult to understand DenisDiderot's hostility for this music. If he doesn't like atonality, why did he buy a two-disc Schoenberg set? One could easily say something about such conservative musical taste reflecting an uptight stance to life, but really, I just feel sorry for people who can't enjoy the beauty, power, depth of such music, played so brilliantly by the extraordinary Arditti Quartet.

Diderot did not listen to the first quartet well enough. Schoenberg almost brought the romantic period to a thundering close with it. But the atonal quartets are the best. They are a treasure trove of sounds waiting to be heard for the first time. Even after the 50th hearing, there are still things I've missed. I like the lyrical quality of these quartets the best; a trait the Arditti Quartet brings out well.

the music contained on this cd is proof enough in and of itself that Arnold Schoenberg was a mediocre musical talent, and turned to composing in an alienist atonal style only after he could plainly see that he could not compete on tonal musical grounds with the likes of strauss, pfitzner, schreker, ravel, debussy, and the like. the man craved attention and success, and most of all, "historical significance" for himself, and therefore devised a system of composing that purposefully could not be understood, thus setting himself up as a pretended misunderstood "genius" in the romantic sense, and claiming that anyone who cried foul regarding his music was simply not sophisticated enough to comprehend his noise. Then he created a rigid mathematical system of organizing tones with no relation whatsoever to natural acoustics or the way human beings make sense of sound. If his ludicrous communistic regimentation of musical tones is not enough to prove that Schoenberg was a musical mediocrity at best, or incompetent at worst, then just listen to the garbage contained on this cd for confirmation.