Berg: String Quartet – Webern: Langsamer Satz – Schoenberg: String Quartet No. 2

Album review

It's hard to put the music of the Second Viennese School on the best-seller charts, but this release by the Heath Quartet made it in the summer of 2022. Some sampling makes it easy to understand why. The music, by Arnold Schoenberg and his two star students, captures the hothouse creative atmosphere just before Schoenberg abandoned tonality, showing the different pieces of the creative puzzles he solved along the way, and it offers food for thought as to the ways in which the students educated the teacher. Berg's String Quartet, Op. 3, is only ambiguously tonal, and its two-movement structure takes Schoenberg's idea of developing variation in new directions. It is an exacting work, with detailed specifications of all aspects of the playing (ironic in that Berg himself was not a string player), but the Heath Quartet achieves liveliness in spite of this. Anton Webern's Langsamer Satz is a different kind of work, fully tonal, but it embodies the lyricism that would feed into many of Schoenberg's later works. The performance of Schoenberg's String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10, in the finale of which the composer completely dispensed with a key signature, is worth the price of admission on its own here; soprano Carolyn Sampson delivers a killer reading of Stefan George's poetry that captures the spookiness of the famed "Ich fühle luft vom anderen planeten" ("I feel air from another planet") as few others do. Signum Classics provides exceptional engineering support, working in the acoustically ideal Stoller Hall in Manchester, England. These works, except the Webern, are often recorded, but this standout release puts them together beautifully.

© James Manheim /TiVo