Schoenberg: String Quartets Nos. 2 & 4

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The Second Quartet’s yearning first movement and the desperate scutterings of its scherzo are conveyed in febrile, hyper-Romantic style…Yet the Gringolt’s precision and finesse in the Fourth... — BBC Music Magazine, December 2017, 4 out of 5 stars More…

Release Date: 1st Sep 2017
Catalogue No: BIS2267
Label: BIS
Length: 64 minutes

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Schoenberg: String Quartet No. 2 in F sharp minor, Op. 10

Work length31:01

$5.55

$9.05

$12.25

Malin Hartelius
Gringolts Quartet
Recorded: June 2016
Recording Venue: SRF Studio, Zürich, Switzerland

I. Mäßig

Track length6:53

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

II. Sehr rasch

Track length7:17

$1.50

$2.60

$3.50

III. Litanei

Track length5:30

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

IV. Entrückung

Track length11:21

$2.05

$3.85

$5.25

Schoenberg: String Quartet No. 4, Op. 37

Work length33:55

$6.00

$10.40

$14.00

Gringolts Quartet
Recorded: June 2016
Recording Venue: SRF Studio, Zürich, Switzerland

I. Allegro molto, energico

Track length9:20

$1.50

$2.60

$3.50

II. Comodo

Track length8:08

$1.50

$2.60

$3.50

III. Largo

Track length7:32

$1.50

$2.60

$3.50

IV. Allegro - Agitato

Track length8:55

$1.50

$2.60

$3.50

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About

Conceived thirty years apart, both works on the present disc came into being at difficult times in the life of Arnold Schoenberg. Emotional stress caused by a marital crisis around 1907-1908 is often claimed to have contributed to the break with tonality that the Second String Quartet represents – in the course of the work Schoenberg moves from the post-Wagnerian chromaticism of Late Romanticism to atonality, with the final movement lacking a key signature altogether. Another unusual feature is the inclusion of a soprano in the two last movements. Schoenberg himself later wrote: 'I was inspired by poems of Stefan George, the German poet ... and, surprisingly, without any expectation on my part, these songs showed a style quite different from everything I had written before.'

Almost thirty years later, in 1936, the String Quartet No. 4 was one of the first works that Schoenberg composed in the U.S.A. after having been forced into exile by the threat of the Nazi regime in Germany. He had left Europe in 1933, but the first years in his new home country had been taxing, with health problems and a difficult work schedule involving teaching in both Boston and New York. If the second quartet is a key work of musical modernism, pointing towards an as yet unknown future, String Quartet No. 4 rests securely on the principles of twelve-tone composition that Schoenberg had developed during the intervening years – but makes use of these principles in a somewhat freer, more relaxed manner than his previous twelve-tone works. The two works are given full-blooded performances by the Gringolts Quartet, joined by the Swedish soprano Malin Hartelius in the Second String Quartet.

Reviews

December 2017

The Second Quartet’s yearning first movement and the desperate scutterings of its scherzo are conveyed in febrile, hyper-Romantic style…Yet the Gringolt’s precision and finesse in the Fourth Quartet also remind one how light-textured and playful Schoenberg could be – though there is no lack of heft in the rhapsodic unisons of the slow movement.

October 2017

It’s a tribute to the Gringolts Quartet’s unanimity and palpable sense of purpose that there is water among the rock…Gringolts is not one of those fly-in, fly-out celebrity leaders…[Hartelius’s] poise and finely drawn lines of phrasing are ideally scaled to the quartet’s compact, Classical style.

Classical Ear October 2017

The great virtue of this disc is in the way Ilya Gringolts and his colleagues make Schoenberg’s sometimes taxing language seem so utterly natural. They also have an acute sense of musical colour.

Schoenberg: String Quartets Nos. 2 & 4

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