Please try again later. Audio CD Verified Purchase. I have other recordings by estimable Czech Quartets such as the Janacek and as Smetena.
String Quartet No.2 'Intimate Letters' (Janáček, Leoš)
This recording compares favorably and it is a nice treat to add the Viola d amore version. Of them, however, Janacek wrote the second so as to have the usual viola voice replaced by that of the multi-stringed viola d'amore 14 tuning pegs! Yielding graciously to some realities of the music business, however, Janacek re-wrote the second with the viola d'more out and the viola in. Bow did not care, however, for the elegance remained.
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And for that matter, that's also the subtext for Beethoven's song cycle 'An die ferne Geliebte' which is, not surprisingly, quoted in the Berlioz score. In he wrote the First Quartet, subtitled 'Kreutzer Sonata', thinking of her. The Second Quartet was originally written with a viola d'amore replacing the viola always used in string quartets. The viola d'amore is a seven string viol with additional strings placed underneath the main strings; those extra strings vibrate in sympathy with the bowed strings. He also used the instrument in the orchestration of his operas 'Katya Kabanova' and 'The Makropoulos Affair.
Janácek, Leoš / String Quartet no. 2 "Intimate Letters" / Bärenreiter Verlag
On this CD both the viola and the viola d'amore versions are played. Indeed, the sound of the instrument completely changes the import of the quartet, making it more a dialog between the viola d'amore and the other strings. Unfortunately, the sound of the viola d'amore is quite soft and sometimes it is drowned out by the other instruments. Its first entrance is marked pp and I had trouble hearing it at all without jacking up the volume.
This was not so much a problem later on. The performances here, including the one of the Quartet No. These are really quite wonderful performances. I suspect a prospective buyer's concern will be whether they want the original version of the Second Quartet as reconstructed. I very much enjoyed it. The Mandelring Quartet is a group of youngish German string players who came together a little more than twenty years ago and who have carved an estimable place for themselves in the seemingly endless profusion of fine quartets of the past quarter century.
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SMETANA B. STRING QUARTET No.2 D minor, JANÁČEK L. STRING QUARTET No.2 INTIMATE LETTERS /
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Withoutabox Submit to Film Festivals. The work was apparently based in part on an earlier piano trio with the same title, composed in , performed in and several times more in the following 13 years, but never published and subsequently lost or destroyed. The work was first performed by the Bohemian Quartet in Prague in October the following year, and published in The first is built largely out of two alternating ideas, which perhaps represent the wife's unfulfilled longings and the husband's increasingly cruel indifference.
The second movement is in polka rhythms, with themes that may suggest the swaggering lover, the husband's growing jealousy, and his wife's mounting ardour. The third begins with a canonic theme adapted from the first movement of the Beethoven sonata, each phrase-end echoed in shuddering tremolandos sul ponticello on the bridge ; it develops into what sounds like a passionate love scene. The finale reintroduces and develops the initial yearning theme, as it moves towards the dramatic climax of the narrative. So his quartet ends not with the disgust and despair, which pervade Tolstoy's novella, but with a defiant assertion of his heroine's individuality and independence.
This found its final and most overt musical expression in his Second Quartet, which he composed in just over three weeks in early , in a pause during the composition of his last opera, From the House of the Dead. He was able to hear a private performance by the Moravian Quartet in May that year; but the work had its first public performance only in September, a month after his death. It was published posthumously, in an edition, which has now been shown not to correspond to his hastily written manuscript in many significant details.
And indeed it has - even more than the First Quartet - an Expressionist urgency and spontaneity, with shifting key centers, incessant fluctuations of tempo and free-flowing thematic development. It begins with two sharply contrasting motifs, respectively declamatory and ghostly, which recur throughout the movement, and are joined later by a more expansively lyrical idea; but the main unifying element is an angular accompanying figure, which crops up in many different guises. The second movement begins as a set of free variations on its opening melody, but later introduces a second theme, a dance in quintuple time, and also brings back the twin motifs of the first movement.
The third movement, the composer wrote to Kamila, expresses his longing that she should have his child. It opens with gentle rocking rhythms, as a prelude to a passionate melody, which is interrupted by bursts of furious activity. It was the first of two works he wrote for the brother-and-sister duo of Joseph and Lillian Fuchs whose playing he had admired in one of Mozart's duos.
Lillian Fuchs was also a distinguished teacher of the viola, her pupils including the Emerson Quartet's Lawrence Dutton. The first of the three movements is a lively two-part invention, which maintains its momentum throughout, and even increases it in a faster coda. The slow movement is in a free, fantasia-like form, beginning with muted trills and tremolandos, passing through virtuoso scale and arpeggio passages to emerge, unmuted, into a more relaxed episode, and culminating in a loose-limbed singing melody utterly characteristic of the composer.
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