Description
Artists
The Kuss Quartet s fourth ONYX album is a programme of Brahms and Schoenberg on which they are joined by the German soprano, Mojca Erdmann, in three Brahms Lieder and in the 2nd of Schoenberg s four string quartets. After composing his First Chamber Symphony Op.9 in 1907, Schoenberg wrote ‘Now I have established my style I know now how I have to compose’. However his next work showed a great deviation in style and tonality is tenuous in the extreme. Schoenberg bids tonality farewell in this extraordinary composition. Setting Stefan George s poems Litanei and Entrücking , the 2nd Quartet caused a scandal. At the first performance ‘all hell broke loose’ wrote the composer ”Stop it! Stop it! We have had enough!’ shouted a well known critic. It was then that people forgot their drawing room manners. Part of the audience joined in the riot …not much of the music penetrated the noise’ Brahms s intense concentrated musical thinking heavily influenced Schoenberg. Like the younger composer however, Brahms was very much ‘a natural continuer of properly understood good old tradition’ (Schoenberg s words describing his own music) and his 3rd Quartet harks back to the classicism of Mozart, especially the Hunt Quartet, also in B flat major. |