Schubert String Quartets - Artemis Quartet (2012)

the next record on the inbox list was a dubstep / big beat thing called “Galactic Booty Activation,” but… just… no. So we’ll skip down the list to something a little classier.

Most music we call “classical” is in fact not from the “classical period.” That is the span of European art music from around 1750 to around 1820, which was ruled by formalism and attention to convention. In the early 1800s, this notion started to give way to the “romantic period,” where the composer found his own voice and expressed his vision without worrying about whether it followed all the strict classical rules. We still call it “classical,” I suppose because calling it “romantic” would confuse fans of love songs. But hey, even the Jurassic Park dinosaurs weren’t actually from the Jurassic.

Written in 1824–near the end of Schubert’s short and difficult life–these quartets are among several late pieces he did that helped to jump start that romantic era.

The first here, called “Death And The Maiden” because it borrowed the themes from an earlier Schubert vocal piece of that name, is morose but beautiful. The quartet lays into it with gusto, a show of force for a story of a woman pleading with death to be spared, and death having none of it.

The second piece is from the year prior. The “Rosamunde” Quartet is similarly named, being taken from some music Schubert had written for a play called Rosamunde. It starts out much more low key, mournful rather than Death And The Maiden’s angry storm. When it builds, it sounds more beautiful than angry, but has all the same command and power.

I have to admit that I didn’t have time to listen to the quartet No. 15 in G major that closes out the recording. It’s nearly as long as the other two quartets combined, and is supposed to have shown how much the world missed out on when Schubert died at age 31. I’ll have to leave that for another time.