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Schoenberg String Quartet in D major  Webern Slow movement for string quartet  Zemlinsky String Quartet No 1    Brodsky Quartet   Vanguard Classics 99208 65'07"

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This CD is subtitled Music from Vienna 1 - (teachers, pupils, tradition and renewal in Vienna). Alexander Zemlinsky was composition teacher and lover to the future Alma Mahler, and was an important teacher and friend to Schoenberg.

Zemlinsky's Op. 4 Quartet in A major is a homage to Brahms, its last movement based on the Brahms musical motto F-A-F. Harmonically advanced, but short of atonality, it is a rich, saturated score.

In Schoenberg's student days, Brahms was a great model (later he orchestrated one of the Brahms piano quartets). His 1897 quartet, premiered at the end of 1898, made him marked as a composer to be watched. It shows also some Dvorak influence. Only a year later came Verklarte Nacht, an astonishingly rapid development of his style.

As Schoenberg's pupil from 1904, Webern composed many works for string quartet, the 1905 Langsamer Satz a rich movement in the late romantic tradition.

This programme of late romantic music contains nothing to upset those for whom the names of Schoenberg and Webern still strike fear and resistance. It is all well played and satisfactorily recorded in summer 1999 at London's new Contemporary Music venue, The Warehouse at Waterloo. There are useful notes, which describe the crucial historical succession in Vienna at the end of the last-but-one century.

Reviewer

Peter Grahame Woolf


Reviewer

Peter Grahame Woolf


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