World Famous Comics: Gerhard Schulz, Hatto Beyerle, Thomas Kakuska, Valentin Erben Günther Pichler Beethoven - The Complete String Quartets / Alban Berg Quartet
Gerhard Schulz, Hatto Beyerle, Thomas Kakuska, Valentin Erben Günther Pichler Beethoven - The Complete String Quartets / Alban Berg Quartet
Good but not great I guess I'm just used to Haydn and Mozart, because these string quartets were just too dissonant and untraditional for me - one who loves the Beethoven symphonies. To each his own, as they say. The recording itself is terrific - great engineering.
VERY HIGH QUALITY RENDITION All the performances on this set of the Beethoven String Quartets are of the highest quality. Particularly outstanding is the performance of Op 59 no 1 Intonation, expression, the ability of the players to meld together, and the dynamic range is all superb. One small flaw (nothing to do with the playing) In the very last track, the final movement of the B flat quartet (not the great fuge, but the movement Beethoven replaced it with), there is a continual flapping sound - I don't know where it came from, but it is very irritating, and I'm surprised that EMI let it through.
All you need to know about String Quartets This boxset has everything you need to know about String Quartets. If this is not enough to mention, we can also remember that the musicians here are one-of-a-kind, and Beethoven wrotes the most rich and precious Opuses for String Quartets. Enjoy yourself!
Budget priced, in a strange order, but excellent A great job by the Berg quartet.
I started with the old Columbia LP of the Budapest's version of the final quartets, but it would be a false note for the Berg quartet to try to recapture the feeling of disaster that pervades the Budapest versions, made as these were during the world war period; no "l'art pour l'art" hot air could convince me that music (a most social art, indeed sociological in Adorno) can be independent in its making from horror.
Instead the Berg quartet seems to me to be more technically proficient, not that I give too much of a damn about this; I have never understood why we think we deserve the first rate reproduction at all times, and the second or third rate reproduction can reveal much more (I'm thinking in this connection of the version of *Kunst der Fuge* made for Naxos by a guy who used to play in my church, Wolfgang Rubsam: there seems to this layman to be a lot of Rubsambato in it but it reproduces for the modern listener the risk of dissonance implicit in fugueing tunes).
To meet the price point, EMI has the quartets in a completely screwed up, if not kittywumpus, order, probably to reduce the disk count. But when you buy the CDs for immediate copying to iPod, you can then put them in the "right" order, by quartet number within opus number.
Be advised, though, that the superb liner notes mention that the opus and number order doesn't reflect Beethoven's order of composing the quartets, but give the correct order.
Listening in either order is a long, spiritual journey, because LVB used the quartet as a laboratory for risky experiments that an orchestra wouldn't be able to play. You discover the origin of the slow movements, the visions of eternity, in the late quartets in the Rasumovsky quartets and in general how Beethoven, like Shakespeare as seen by Gary Wells, didn't finish "finished" works once and for all, but was troubled by aporias and untried alternatives and would screw around with them until the late quartets, when it appeared that Beethoven decided to be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, and used the quartet for distinctly Modernist experiments.
Modernist, in the sense of clearing out the concert hall as the more typical music "lovers" fled in horror in the middle of the Grosse Fuge, in which he gave himself license to cock a snook at a society of pompous fools that had taken his best and given him jack s*t.
Adorno (yeah, Adorno) felt that you can't understand music except as a dialectical logic. This is the opposition of thesis and antithesis and the production of a synthesis containing both, in a nondialectical formulation which drops most of the dialectic on the floor: the dialectic has to be lived and may be sheer Blarney: but it pervades our reception of all music worth more than one listening.
The fact is that I stopped being able to listen to David Bowie's Helden (Heroes) despite this being my favorite rock and roll anthem, but never fast forward past the Grosse Fuge.
In the late quartets, the magnificence (sublimity) of utter loss of control somehow contained is followed by slow movements which constitute sincere and loving apologies for smashing the crockery. Beethoven's irreconcilability to himself and the unacceptability of being raised by an alcoholic (which is what his Dad was) was also his relation to his family and society as a whole. It makes great cinema as two recent movies (Immortal Beloved and Copying Beethoven) have shown.
My fat pal Adorno was puzzled by the theological implications of the late Beethoven and never managed to stop writing about it, his writings being themselves a search for the solution to this mystery: Bach is only with difficulty shoehorned into an ad maiorem dei gloriam Procrustean framework, and the theology of the Dangkegesang is something pre-Christian, a sacrifice for a fleeting sense of material well-being. Pain isn't celebrated in the late quartets.
Beethoven didn't go back to Bach, but like most advanced musicians of his day, including Mendelssohn, he was fascinated by "learned" music, music that almost (but not quite) is meant to be read in a score, and not played at all by a cafe orchestra...or if played by a Wolfgang Rubsam, to be played, as he plays, without excessive respect for the text, and some abandon.
Frank Zappa said that most rock and roll writing is written by those who cannot write for those who cannot read. Most classical music reviews on Amazon seem to affirm this also for classical music and its dialectical potential: on the one hand, one wants to shake the theological respect people have for classical concerts out of them by farting loudly, on the other hand, one is enraged by the lack of respect underlying the excessive respect (a lack of respect shown by the actual material treatment of the members of actual symphony orchestras, neatly and dialectically answered by their alienation, which was noted early on by Aaron Copland).
Oh Freunde, nicht dieses Tonen. Enough! Ess muss sein.
Beautiful Music, Bargain Price What a fantastic set of cds! The recordings are superb. I have listened to this set repeatedly and it is always fresh! The Alban Berg Quartet plays the music with sensitivity and polish. I listen to the music with my headphones and am transported to a different place. It's just me and the quartet...and the music! The price for this journey is less than a good meal at a fine restaurant. If you like the idea of enjoying hours of music at a price that is astounding, this is the box set for you! Go ahead order the set-you deserve it.
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