Search - Arnold Schoenberg, Schoenberg Quartet, Janneke van der Meer :: Arnold Schoenberg: Chamber Music for Strings

Essential recording

Dan d'Auteuil | Neuilly sur Seine France | 11/06/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is a monumental recording. It ended my search for a good performance of Schoenberg's complete string quartets. Compared for instance to the Arditti's version, which makes for a pretty "difficult" listen, hard on the ear and the brain, this one is pretty "easy". Let's not argue about the "romantic" or "modernist" points of vue which have plagued the Schoenberg issue for much too long. This boxed set is a mature rendition of some of the most essential works of the XXth century. The Schoenberg quartet provides excellent performance throughout (although their version of "Verklärte Nacht" might seem rather dark and lacking in contrast as compared to, say, the Boulez reading). This is Schoenberg beyond theory, this is, to put it simply, Schoenberg's music as Schoenberg himself might have wished to hear it. Thanks to the Schoenberg Quartet, the 21st century should see at last a vast audience starting to appreciate a body of work on a par with that of the greats which Schoenberg revered so much : Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms. Treat yourself to this one and relish in an adventure (while it still tastes like adventure)."

Unbelievable Deal

Michael Taylor | Duluth, GA United States | 12/11/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"To begin with, it needs to be mentioned what an incredible deal is the mp3 edition of this album. 6 DISCS of music for only $18 is a steal, especially for something like this for which there are few, mostly out of print recordings.



As for the music, I must preface this by saying that I'm not an expert on Schoenberg; but customer reviews aren't just for people who know the music inside and out. What I can say is that, before I listened to these quartets on this disc, I didn't understand the appeal of Schoenberg at all. I had listened to Boulez recordings of some of the dodecaphonic orchestral and piano recordings, and I thought they were interesting as intellectual and stylistic exercises but much less interesting as music. I've listened to these several times now, and I can genuinely say I get a lot of pleasure out of them; in fact they've become some of my favorite pieces of classical music. Obviously, everyone's tolerance for dissonance is different, and your tolerance for it needs to be basically absolute for the third and fourth quartets. But as introductions to Schoenberg, the string quartets are pretty close to perfect. There's a very clean progression of "difficulty" from one to the next, and if you can't take one yet, you can listen to the previous again, or Verklarte Nacht, which you also get in this set. If you can handle this kind of music, Schoenberg's worth learning to love, and this is your best opportunity to try."