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

For the first time all the music written for the unusual combination of string quartet and voice by the three most important composers of the Second Viennese School, Schoenberg, Webern and Berg appears together on a single CD. The music is performed by one of the best young ensembles of recent years, the Quatuor Diotima, with important contributions from the distinguished singers Sandrine Piau and Marie-Nicole Lemieux.

Founded by graduates of the Paris and Lyon conservatoires, the Diotima Quartet is a favoured partner of many contemporary composers, including Helmut Lachenmann, Brian Ferneyhough, and Toshio Hosokawa. It regularly commissions new pieces from such composers as Emmanuel Nunes and James Dillon, but it by no means neglects the classic string quartet repertoire, paying particular attention to the late quartets of Beethoven, French music, and the music of the early 20th century.

Only the first of the three works recorded here, Schoenberg’s Quartet op.10, has been regularly published since 1912. The second, a Bagatelle by Webern for string quartet with voice, was abandoned by its composer and remained unpublished. It was premiered only twenty years after his death. Berg’s Lyric Suite was published in 1927 in the form of a purely instrumental suite for string quartet. Its initial conception however contains a ‘private’ encrypted version, the existence of which was revealed only in 1977. This arrangement includes a soprano voice doubling the principal line of the last movement set to the words of a poem from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, ‘De Profundis Clamavi’, translated by Stefan George.

Founded in 1979, The Petersen Quartett have established themselves as a highly acclaimed quartet, performing in concert halls worldwide. Famous for devoting their energies to the demands both of the classical quartet literature and of contemporary music, they are regarded in every respect as a pioneering ensemble among the new generation of string quartets. They have exceeded any ordinary repertoire of a string quartet and Phoenix Edition is delighted to present recordings of Schönberg, Webern and Berg.

The quartet are joined by Christine Schäfer, whose collaboration with the Petersen Quartett on a recording of Aribert Reimann’s collection of Mendelssohn/Schumann song transcriptions on the Capriccio label was the winner of the 2007 ECHO Klassik Award for Best Lied recording.

Both string quartet and soprano aim to broaden ther horizons by constantly searching new, exciting programme material and they accomplish this on this new CD that features the sensational re-discovery of the secret voice from Alban Berg’s “Lyrical Suite” as well as Arnold Schönberg’s string quartet No. 2 (unusual in that a soprano voice is included instead of a string quartet in the 3rd and 4th movements) and Anton Webern’s “Slow Movement”; all of them masterfully rendered.