Alban Berg Chamber Music Schoenberg Quartet

Sony Classical releases Juilliard String Quartet – The Early Columbia Recordings: Sony Classical is excited to present a newly remastered selection in 24bit of the earliest albums of this august American ensemble. Made between 1949 and 1956 in Columbia’s studio on Manhattan’s 30th St., these landmark recordings are mostly new to listeners…

This 4-CD boxed set presents historic recordings of works by Arnold Schoenberg, the founding father of 20th-century modern music, and his most prominent pupils, Alban Berg and Anton Webern.

The good news is that this is as attractive a disc of late romantic string sextet music as has ever been released. With the young yet poised and powerful Artemis Quartett as the basic ensemble augmented by violist Thomas Kakuska and cellist Valentin Erben from the Alban Berg Quartet, these performances have a warmth, an intelligence, and a soulfulness to rival the finest performers of the past.

This is a two-disc collection of music, either recorded on France's Naïve label or acquired by that label, that arose in Vienna during the years on either side of 1900. It might be argued that the music of the Viennese fin de siècle was all about extremes – of length, of concision, of orchestration – and that the best way to appreciate the musical culture of Vienna in 1900 would be to sit down and listen to a Mahler symphony from beginning to end. Still, for a program of short excerpts devoted to music that did not think in those terms, this one works remarkably well. It draws key connections that are usually ignored, and the biggest one is between Brahms on the one hand and the Second Viennese School on the other.