PENTATONE releases Bruckner & Klose String Quartets, together with Quatuor Diotima, in August 2024.
Highlighting Bruckner’s Chamber-Musical Achievements And Legacy
Quatuor Diotima celebrates the bicentennial anniversary of Anton Bruckner with a recording of his String Quartet in C Minor, Rondo in C Minor and Theme with Variations in E-Flat Major, alongside the world premiere recording of the String Quartet in E-Flat Major from his pupil Friedrich Klose.
Bruckner wrote these pieces as composition exercises, yet they adumbrate the originality and power of his later works, as well as pay tribute to the glorious Viennese quartet tradition. Like Bruckner, Klose strongly sympathized with Wagner and the proponents of programme music, and chamber music had not appealed to him very much up until the moment he embarked on his only string quartet composition. Sarcastically, he subtitled it a “tribute paid in four instalments to my stern German schoolmasters”, yet he demonstrates a full mastery of the conventions of musical form, paired with an almost unprecedented wealth of musical ideas.
This album, recorded at and in close cooperation with the Brucknerhaus Linz, shall be one of the most original contributions to the Bruckner Year 2024, highlighting his achievements in the field of chamber music as well as his compositional legacy.
Quatuor Diotima is one of the most in-demand chamber ensembles in the world today, and has worked in close collaboration with several of the greatest composers of the late twentieth century. Reflected in the mirror of today’s music, the quartet projects a new light onto the masterpieces of the 19th and 20th centuries. The quartet returns to PENTATONE after their acclaimed Metamorphosis Ligeti, released in 2023
“The E-flat variations by Bruckner are delicate, pious, and subtle transformations of a theme that would fit the Kyrie of a mass… a heavenly portal to the musical world of Bruckner.
Friedrich Klose’s quartet explores so many facets of romantic expression, we have the feeling it is the quartet that Bruckner – the oneof the later symphonies – would’ve composed.”
Quatuor Diotima
Digital Release Date: 23 AUGUST 2024
Physical Release: AUGUST 2024
Released as 1 Standard CD and in digital formats for streaming and high-resolution downloads
