Search - Van Dieren, Bosmans, Mosolov :: String Quartets From the Twenties

A major discovery

Dr. Richard M. Price | London, UK | 11/19/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The great find on this CD is the quartet by van Dieren. He was a Dutchman who lived in London from 1912 till his death in 1936, writing a series of works that were vastly admired by a few kindred spirits (including Philip Heseltine and William Walton) but had no wider impact. His string quartets have been said to be his finest works, and this is the last of them. Despite some weaknesses (the final cadences at the end of each movement are too conventional), it is a perfect example of chamber music at its most intimate: the music sounds like the conversation of friends, concise, at times allusive, intelligent, in good humour, never monotonous or predictable, never hectoring, never obtruding inappropriate emotion, in all almost Mozartean (despite a quite different idiom). Compared to this work, the quartets of even Bartok and Schoenberg sound a little too conscious of the concert hall. This is perfect music for the era of the CD; let us hope that recordings of van Dieren's other quartets will follow."