Customer Reviews

Schoenberg: String Quartets Nos. 1 & 2

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The Great d-minor Quartet...
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Schönberg's terrific d-minor Quartet (Op. 7) is a sublime work of Jugendstil-Art Nouveau of nearly an hour's pure music--the largest and longest single work for string quartet ensemble ever composed.
The work's post-Lisztian portmanteau form fuses (and conceals) the traditional four movements of the Quartet viz., Moderato, Scherzo-Trio, Adagio, Rondo.
This masterpiece, along with his d-minor Sextet (Op. 4), d-minor Tone Poem (Op. 5), Lieder (Opp 1, 2, 3, 6) and Orchesterlieder (Op. 8), and E-major `chamber' Symphony (Op. 9) exhibit the style of Schönberg's First Period featuring a preference for eccentric melodies, quartal harmony and whole tone scales, periodic asymmetry, intense polyphony, and marvellous exploitation of instrumental effects.
Schönberg himself thought of this style as `musical prose'.
With this style Schönberg had found his own original artistic voice based on the most extreme examples of all his musical forbears; and had not the cataclysm of the First World War intervened, he surely would have produced more works in this style.

In the d-minor Quartet we may see the ancestors Beethoven and Brahms in their richest and most complex moments which have subsequently given life to this highly wrought and contrapuntally intricate grandchild who has periods of explosive moodiness and also of intellectual serenity--cf., the drawn-out coda (in a shimmering D-major) unfolds and stretches out in a long lovely lush late-Romanticism rivalling anything in the so-called `Indian Summer' of Richard Strauss.
Indeed, like Verklärte Nacht, there may be an amorous programmatic undercurrent in the First String Quartet, for a certain melody is directly quoted from Schönberg's contemporaneous song `Allurement' (or, `Seduction' Op. 6, No. 7).

The Prazák Quartet of Prague is one of a small handful of super-heavyweight ensembles currently working--(that list would certainly include the Emersons and Leipzigers, although the Artis is aspiring to enter this exclusive class from which the Amadeus and LaSalles have retired).

This issue also includes a fine performance of the Second String Quartet, reissued with No. 0 on Nos. 0 & 2; also No. 1 reissued with Berg's Lyric Suite No. 1.

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the Prazák's complete Schönberg cycle:

No. 0 & String Trio String Quartet No. 0
No. 0 & No. 2 String Quartets Nos. 0 & 2
No. 1 & No. 2 String Quartets Nos. 1 & 2
No. 3 & Quartettsätzen String Quartet No. 3
No. 4 & String Sextet String Quartet No. 4
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