Berg: String Quartet, Op. 3

The latest release by the Signum Quartett showcases music written during the 20th century.

Berg, Bartók and Schnittke all took different approaches in their quest to further the development of the string quartet and this makes for an interesting and varied programme.

Schubert’s late masterpiece for string quartet, his 15th and final quartet in G major D887, was composed in 1826. Although the first movement was performed at a Vienna Musikverein concert devoted to his music, he couldn’t find anyone to publish it.

It displays an almost Beethovenian profundity, and is a dramatic departure from the two previous song-based quartets that had proved popular. The writing is assured and the harmonies audacious. It is a dark, rather introverted work, full of passionate outbursts and drama.

Berg’s Quartet op.3 was premiered in 1911 towards the end of his studies with Schoenberg. It was badly received and baffled listeners and performers alike. Like the Schubert G major, it displays daring harmonies and a remarkable technical assurance.

This CD is the Kuss Quartet’s debut on ONYX. They are regular performers at the Edinburgh and Salzburg festivals, and also perform regularly in New York, London and their home city of Berlin.

The 44-year-old history of the Tokyo String Quartet, one of the best quartets in the world, comes to an end in June, 2013. The Quartet has decided that due to the retirement of two of its members, the entire ensemble would disband after 44 successful years. A certain sense of nostalgia definitely appears when hearing the music on this recording.

Alban Berg (1885-1935) is, arguably, the most approachable of the three great serialist composers who were working in Vienna at the turn of the century – Schoenberg and Webern being the other two. Of the three, it was Berg whose technique was less stringently atonal: his music has a romantic lyricism that is largely absent from the later music of his two friends.

This is no better illustrated than in his last work, the gorgeously wistful Violin Concerto of 1935, a work that is dedicated 'To the Memory of an Angel' – the angel being the recently deceased 18-year-old, Manon Gropius, daughter of the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius and Mahler's surviving widow Alma.

The other works in this set help to make it the perfect introduction to Berg's music, from the Suite from his notorious opera Lulu to the beautiful Lyric Suite and the early lyricism of the Seven Early Songs.

This disc of Berg’s complete output for chamber music was originally issued by Chandos in 2001, as part of the Schoenberg Quartet’s traversal of all the chamber music written by the Second Viennese School. It included many rarities and arrangements – here, for instance, is the only currently available recording of Berg’s own transcription of the last of his early and passionate Altenberg-Lieder for a quartet of piano, harmonium, violin and cello, made for performance at an influential private musical society, established by Schoenberg in 1900 in order to play and promote the revolutionary music of himself, his friends and associates, away from the catcalls of the conservative Viennese public. This disc contains some of the most heartfelt and openly passionate music from a musical school often regarded as forbidding and abstract.