Edding Quartet Beethoven: String Quartet No.13, Quintet For Piano

The pairing of the two works on this album is unique in that one comes from the dawn, the other from the dusk of Ludwig van Beethoven’s career. Indeed, whereas the composer wrote the Quintet for winds and piano , Op. 16 when he was only 26 – the talented young man also excelled as a successful pianist –, he did not finish his String Quartet, Op. 130, until a year before his death. The Edding quartet proposes here the original version of the work, with the Grosse Fuge , op.133, as final. The direct comparison of these two works on the same disc intelligently sheds light on the fantastic distance the composer covered between these two points in time.