Positive feedback Jan 2023
Staying with Cuarteto Quiroga as they provide a masters class on the (R)evolution that was the Second Viennese School post 1900. They start with Schoenberg’s first (and unpublished until 1966) String Quartet in D Major – a very tonal piece – and ending with Webern’s Bagatelles, Op. 9, in which Webern plays about with the twelve sounds that will eventually configure his serial system. Fascinating connections, evolutions. Of course, the album ends where it all began, with Bach.
The tonality of the Schoenberg’s String Quartet in D Major may come as bit of a shock for those of us carrying our impression of Schoenberg as that atonal twelve-tone “monster”. When I mentioned to Ann that I had just listened to a lovely work by Schoenberg, she visibly shuddered. She’s always less enjoyed modern atonal music than I. So, if you are like Ann in your reaction to the composer’s name, go find this quartet and listen to it. It will really place Schoenberg in context for the work he did moving from the post-Romantic idiom and laying the foundations for a lot of modern music.
On the other hand, and opposite end of the spectrum, is Alban Berg’s String Quartet No. 1, Op. 3(1910). Now here is an atonal masterpiece that will set your nerves to vibrating. I LOVE IT. By modern standards, this actually sounds quite benign to my ears. Yet it turned the world on its collective ear. It was the first string quartet of recital length written in the strikingly new language of pervasive atonality. And yet, you can hear that its feet are firmly grounded in the late Romantic tradition—while dramatically challenging it. Cuarteto Quiroga is again giving us this education in the evolution of musical language over the decades.
Writes Kai Christiansen in Earsense about Berg’s Opus 3: “With Schoenberg’s 12-tone technique still a good decade in the future, it follows Schoenberg’s own initial broach with atonality in his second string quartet a few years prior (1908) as well as Webern’s revolutionary Five Pieces for Orchestra just the year before (1909). Fifteen years later, Berg would compose his second string quartet, the Lyric Suite, a perfect bookend to the first string quartet illustrating Berg’s complete musical evolution. Ultimately, Berg’s celebrated works include his Violin Concerto and the opera Wozzeck.”
Anton Webern is represented by his Six Bagatelles for String Quartet, Op. 9 (1911-1913), which present with all the evocative elegance of a haiku. Listen carefully as these begin. They will go by fast, with all but one being under a minute in duration. Here you have a musical reduction into intense wisps of sound that continue just long enough to penetrate one’s consciousness. Full concentration is required. And, of course, it is completely atonal.
The album closes with an excerpt from Bach’s St. Mathew’s Passion: “Befehl du deine Wege (Herzlich tut mich verlangen)”. One-minute, twenty-five seconds of bliss. Because, as Cuarteto Quiroga says that Webern would say, “everything happens in Bach.” And thus ends their lesson for today about the evolution begun by Schoenberg, Berg and Webern.
To place a cherry on the top of this excellent performance and programming, the sound quality given us by Tom Peeters at Cobra Records is simply transportive. A rich, nicely reverberant, natural acoustic venue in which Tom captures beautifully the timbre of strings and resonance of wood. This is wonderfully recorded and presented album.
Rushton Paul
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