Customer Reviews

Rochberg: String Quartets Nos. 3-6

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I was overjoyed to see these recordings released on CD a few years ago. I heard Rochberg's third quartet in a college class in the mid-1970s, and it changed my life. It was the first time I had heard music that was beautiful, emotional, tonally connected to the previous 500 years of classical music -- yet written in my lifetime. It is powerfully beautiful, something of a melding of Bartok with Mahler (as many other have noticed). The variations movement has become well-known as a concert piece in its own right, in a version for string orchestra -- but is at its best played by just four musicians in the context of the whole work.

The remaining three quartets are perhaps not quite as stunning, but are worthy compositions in much the same vein.

These pieces were written for the Concord String Quartet (now alas just a memory), which performs them here. They were a phenomenal ensemble, just the right people for this music.

If you love chamber music, you simply should not be without these recordings. The 3rd quartet is beyond words a masterpiece of music, and the other quartets are rewarding as well.

It has been no secret that I adore the music of George Rochberg. And the work of his that started this love affair was his Third String Quartet, premiered in 1972 and recorded on a Nonesuch LP in 1973 by the dedicatees, the Concord Quartet, a group noted for its championing of contemporary American music. The recording of this wildly eclectic work caused a furor when it came out. There were strong opinions pro and con, but mostly the people deriding it were the academics -- interestingly, Rochberg spent most of his adult life as an academic, at Penn -- who were staunch defenders of atonality, chance music, musique concrète, electronic music or serialism. Most music-lovers with no ax to grind fell in love with the work. And what was not to love? The quartet is eclectic, yes, with bits influenced or reminiscent of Bartók, Stravinsky and - gasp! - Beethoven, but brilliantly so. The music has been charged with being episodic, but what episodes! It was particularly the Variations Movement that drew criticism, the one that sounds somewhat like a slow movement from a late Beethoven quartet. It was revolutionary to write purposefully in a passé style, and Beethoven at that! But it is, for my taste, one of the most glorious things written for quartet by an American, or by anyone for that matter, in the twentieth century.

Five years later, at the Concord's request, Rochberg wrote three more 'Concord' quartets, Nos. 4, 5 & 6, and they, too, took the music world by storm. Bernstein, no stranger to eclecticism in his own music by then, called them masterpieces and that they are.

The performances here are simply sensational. It is a shame that the Concord Quartet is no more, but the Quartet disbanded in 1987 and the individual players went their separate ways. The players, who deserve to be named and remembered, are Mark Sokol and Andrew Jennings, violins; John Kochanowski, viola; and Norman Fischer, cello.

For anyone who cares about American chamber music or even all American music of any genre, this CD is a landmark and a must-have.

Top recommendation.

Scott Morrison

Thoroughly modern work in the Romantic vein. Much more approachable than works by other modern composes (Ligeti, for example). Spectacular composition and playing: pieces range from delicate (the Pachelbel Canon Variations) to "emergency strings" (Quartet No. 3, Part A: I. Introduzione) and contain both unique work and quotations from other composers. Highly recommended for those who enjoy complex string music.

Studying music composition in the early 1980's, these works were for me a liberating experience. I didn't reject modernism, but I did reject the the prevailing attitude that serialism or one of it's progeny was the ultimate evolution of music. The prevailing aethetic was that there was no inherent emotional content to music. It was just notes and one must arrange them in a mathematically precise way. It was in its way the ultimate formalism and absolutism. That left those of us who regarded music as a language capable of expressing the full range of human experience out in the cold. What if music was your language of choice for expressing feeling? George Rochberg's Third String Quartet was a validation of the idea that music was as emotional a language as any other human language. There's a lot made of the tonal sections of this piece. The third movement is like a cross between Beethoven and early Schoenberg with a lyrical and emotional intensity quite unlike anything from the period. It's pretty. It's ravishingly pretty. It's also beautifully crafted. The outer movements have tonal sections mixed with jarring atonal expressionist music, but it all seems to be saying something. Ultimately I hear it as a requiem for his son, just as the Dvorak Cello Concerto and the Berg Violin Concerto are requiems. It's very crafty - arguably as well crafted as the great works in the quartet tradition - but the humanity of the work recommends it even more. The other quartets are very enjoyable as well. You have to "take your dissonance like a man" (Charles Ives) for some of the music, but others are very interesting re-examinations of late Beethoven. As a practical matter, the late Beethoven quartets were a dead end in the evolution of music. Rochberg picks things up where he left off, like maybe if Schumann or Brahms had taken the late works seriously. The last movement of the 6th quartet is a lot of fun. It's built from parts of Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart and Schubert quartets, the music all fused together, elaborated, developed and made into a new whole.

This is a great recording of some chamber music work by a very interesting modern composer -- one who started out espousing atonality a la John Cage, but abandoned it to write music which is more "traditional". These three quartets bridge that change, and offer a fascinating insight into musical creativity. His early works are very, very modern, whilst that later are similar to Beethoven. Amazing!