Schubert: String Quartets No 9 & No 14 "Death and the Maiden"

 
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FRANZ SCHUBERT
Schubert: String Quartets No 9 & No 14 "Death and the Maiden"
Chiaroscuro Quartet

[ BIS SACD / Hybrid SACD ]

Release Date: Sunday 28 October 2018

This item is currently out of stock. We expect to be able to supply it to you within 2 - 4 weeks from when you place your order.

One of the truly iconic works in the repertoire for string quartet, Franz Schubert's Death and the Maiden is named after the song which has lent its theme to the second movement. At the end of Matthias Claudius's poem, which Schubert had set as a 20-year-old in 1817, Death cradles the Maiden in his bony embrace. And her fear, in the first verse, of encountering his tomb-cold touch is mirrored by his desire for her in the second. In Schubert's life time, death was a constant presence in everyday life and even a young person like himself would have encountered it at close quarters - in fact, his own mother had passed away when he was only 15.

When Schubert returns to the song in 1824 and starts work on the string quartet, death has nevertheless grown even more real: in the meantime he has become acquainted with pain and disease during the bouts of the syphilis that he knows will kill him. He turns the song into a set of variations, preceding it with a ferocious Allegro, and following it with a Scherzo and a Finale that have been described as 'the dance of the demon fiddler' and 'a dance with death'. The acclaimed Chiaroscuro Quartet performs the work on gut strings, which brings out the vulnerability and desperation even further. The players then let us down gently with the youthful String Quartet No. 9 in G minor, a work in which the minor key offers Schubert the opportunity to play with light and shadows, rather than full-scale drama.

"With their 'period' sound world (gut strings, Classical bows, sharp articulation) allied to hungry tempos and phrasing that vaults across the bar line, Schubert's darkest quartet seems more than ever a study in the inexorable power of rhythm…Their unvarnished sonorities (vibrato minimal or non-existent) make Schubert's harmonic clashes all the more excruciating...It is also, properly, a drama of uncomfortable extremes." Gramophone Editor's Choice Nov 2019

"The Chiaroscuro Quartet are particularly good at capturing the more forward-looking moments…Their use of gut strings and a historically-informed approach produces focused tone throughout; the playing might seem hard-edged at times, but their rhythmic poise is a constant delight and they are always responsive to the interplay between individual lines." BBC Music

"Light and shade abound in performances of brisk, fierce beauty" The Strad

Tracks:

String Quartet No.14 in D minor, D810 40'21
01 I. Allegro 15'08
02 II. Andante con moto 11'48
03 III. Scherzo. Allegro molto 4'23
04 IV. Presto 9'02

String Quartet No.9 in G minor, D173 22'21
05 I. Allegro con brio 5'40
06 II. Andantino 6'10
07 III. Menuetto. Allegro vivace 3'56
08 IV. Allegro 6'35