Beethoven: Quatuor n. 10, Shostakovich quartor n.5

Beethoven, Ludwig van, Shostakovich, Dmitry

Atrium String Quartet

ZZT 080702

The string quartet - the supreme discipline of chamber music "„... one hears four reasonable people talking to each other, believes to gain something from their discourses and to get to know the peculiarities of the instruments". With these words Goethe characterized the string quartet in a letter to Zelter in 1829. Joseph Haydn may claim to be the actual inventor of this genre. Although other musicians of his generation also wrote string quartets at an early age, these works remained gallant genre pieces that differed little in form and content from the divertimenti, which were immensely popular in the early classical period, in other words light music in the truest sense of the word. Wolfgang Amadé Mozart offers a good example of this with his string quartets from Milan, which belong to his early works: Even today, almost 250 years after its creation, the charming music is still a matter of its own, but it cannot compete with the master's late quartets from the 1780s, which grew according to Haydn's teaching example • Ludwig van Beethoven set the standard for the future with his sixteen string quartets, "treasures for whose greatness we cannot find words," wrote Robert Schumann. The model of Beethoven instilled a reverence in Saint-Saëns, in which fear certainly dominated, and he only ventured late into the composition of his two string quartets. Beethoven's legacy also left its mark on Dimitri Shostakovich, who found his way to the string quartet during the Stalinist purges of 1938.

CD

28.12.2011

3760009291751