MARBECKS COLLECTABLE: Juilliard Quartet - 50 years

When William Schuman founded a string quartet at New York's Juilliard School in 1946, he envisaged an ensemble not only to teach the elite New York conservatory's students but also, in its own public performances, to "play the standard repertoire with the sense of excitement and discovery of a new work and play new works with a reverence usually reserved for the classics." From its first appearances in New York, the Juilliard String Quartet was identified as a champion of modern music. Its first recordings for American Columbia, all included here, were dedicated to the works of Alban Berg and Béla Bartók (only recently deceased), as well as to Arnold Schoenberg (still very much alive), and to active American composers including Schuman himself.

When the recordings of new American quartets were first released in the mid-50s, High Fidelity's reviewers enthusiastically took up the cudgels for them, writing: "William Schuman's fourth string quartet is a big, serious, robust work, rather involved in form, rich in harmonic color, but especially rich in the variety and originality of its rhythms." "[Leon] Kirchner's quartet has the accent of urgency, power and overriding imaginativeness one associates with Béla Bartók's compositions for the same medium … The work has its own immensely individual profile. One feels it is music that had to be written, and one feels behind it the mind of a great composer." "The [Irving] Fine stands out for its fantasticality, its highly dissonant texture, and its individual formal devices; it employs the 12-tone system within a freely tonal framework."