Webern: Works for String Quartet

Composer: Anton Webern, Performer: Emerson String Quartet - Webern: Works for String Quartet

Webern: Works for String Quartet
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Artist: Composer: Anton Webern, Performer: Emerson String Quartet
Edition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 1995-05-16
Music Label: Deutsche Grammophon
Soundtracks:
  1. No. 1, Heftig bewegt
  2. No. 2, Sehr langsam
  3. No. 3, Sehr bewegt
  4. No. 4, Sehr langsam
  5. No. 5, In zarter Bewegung
  6. No. 1, Massig
  7. No. 2, Leicht bewegt
  8. No. 3, Ziemlich fliessend
  9. No. 4, Sehr langsam
  10. No. 5, Ausserst langsam
  11. No. 6, Fliessend
  12. I M?big, Op 09 No 01
  13. II Schmerz, immer blick nach oben
  14. III Flie?end, Op 09 No 06
  15. Sehr Langsam
  16. Sehr Getragen Und Ausdrucksvoll
  17. M?ssig
  18. Gem?chlich
  19. Sehr fliessend

Free Music Notes for Webern: Works for String Quartet

Free Music Review: economical emotional expression.
Hit: 5 Stars

Few things excite me like modernist chamber music, but Webern's works for string quartet have never really grabbed me. How disappointing! Or so I thought. Today I spent several hours listening through these pieces chronologically. Now it all makes sense: The longer pieces, all the earliest Webern wrote (the slow movement, the string quartet, and the rondo), are pleasant and unambitious. They all carry with them the influence of Webern's teacher, Arnold Schoenberg. These early pieces lack much in the way of identity and compositional rigor, as they seem to be more in the business of evoking _Verlarkte nacht_ and Schoenberg's first quartet than anything Webern-esque!

After these early works, things get interesting -- and the only real `problem' is that Webern's compositions are so short that if your attention wanders for even a second you'll have missed a pivotal moment in the piece! Therein lies the challenge of "getting" the music. Webern's music is carried out with introverted efficiency so, as a listener, you must be very committed with your attention. The first piece to explore the alien world of atonality is _five movements for string quartet_, which lasts only eight or nine minutes. Its colorful gestures, like percussive effect by striking with the wood of the bow and progressive intervals, invite one into the exciting soundworld of artists setting out for the world of atonality, which is limited only by one's imagination.

Webern's imagination blooms with great-yet-compact results, as he writes pieces even shorter than the _five movements_. Yet here, in a brief phase before he adopted Schoenberg's serialist method, he preserves affecting power of expression in pieces whose movements are virtually never longer than a minute. The _six bagatelles_ and _three pieces_, expressing loss and sadness, are painful to listen to. They are, it seems, "pieces" in a more denotative sense of the term -- fragments of painful emotion, rendered with articulate and unconventional language and technique. (the song-piece, the second part of the _three pieces_, is performed by mezzo-soprano Mary Ann-McCormick with exquisite pain).

Three pieces for string trio and quartet emerge with the advent of serialism. These are remarkable pieces -- again, short but precious. Be it the angular, swirling motions a surprising melodicism of op.20, or the perfect, careful conception of op.28, with its deep lyrical beauty scattered across the different instruments with prudent economy and emotional sensitivity, Webern's late serialist chamber works are some of the finest to be offered.

Webern's string music is epic in its emotional dimension, not its size and scope. Within these short pieces are systems of necessity, pure and without artificial extension. I can't believe it took me so long to appreciate them.

Webern: Works for String Quartet Poster

Opening with the longest single movement Anton Webern ever composed, this collection of his nine works for string quartet and trio covers his entire career. For starters, it bears reminding that the first, longest movement he wrote encompasses a mere nine minutes--glorious minutes, but only nine of them. They make up the 1905 string quartet, taken abundantly through its most sonorous dialogues by the Emerson String Quartet, who provide a lavish setting in Lawrence Dutton's viola for the crucial middle ground between David Finckel's robust cello and the sometimes jarred, sometimes whizzing violins of Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer. Beyond the first string quartet, there are loads of vantages here from which to examine postserial music. For while Webern owed much to Schoenberg's revolution, he owed even more to an inherently economic sense of wholeness. These are miniatures, really, each cutting rapidly to the quick of the matter and finding sometimes abrupt completion. It's perfect music for an era when the tension between experimentation and economy of phrasing urges on creative motion. And here it's perfectly played: tense, sad, sweet, and urgent. --Andrew Bartlett

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