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- From: bwalsh@math.rutgers.edu (Bertram Walsh)
- Newsgroups: rec.music.classical
- Subject: Re: Opinions sought: Beethoven's Late String Quartets
- Message-ID: <Dec.28.10.32.15.1992.18827@math.rutgers.edu>
- Date: 28 Dec 92 15:32:15 GMT
- References: <1992Dec21.194805.14256@stortek.com> <1992Dec25.214704.26108@cronkite.ocis.temple.edu>
- Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
- Lines: 29
-
- >John Grabowski posts:
-
- >Possibly my favorite recording in my entire collection is of the Op.
- >131 String Quartet transcribed for an entire string orchestra.
- >Conducted by Bernstein, with the Vienna Phil., it's not the textbook
- >way to do it, but it is nonetheless, a stunning musical experience.
-
- My impression was diametrically opposite to this one: I thought it
- worked about as well as using a chorus of sixty-odd distinguished
- actors as the protagonist in _Hamlet_. Oh, what rogues and peasant
- slaves are we! Instead of four focused single lines, you get some-
- thing perilously close to Mantovani (anybody remember him?). This is
- all right as an exercise in virtuosity -- Revelli had the whole first-
- clarinet section of the Michigan band play the polonaise of the second
- v. Weber concerto, too, just to show how good they were (and he was)
- -- but the quartet timbre and intimacy are part of Beethoven's concep-
- tion, and you're doing enormous violence to that conception when you
- put huge string sections on those lines. (The Mendelssohn octet does
- not suffer so much when conductors do the same thing to it, because
- there are already so many people around with one instrument per line
- 8-).)
-
- BTW, to Deryk Barker's enthusiastic mention of the pre-WWII recordings
- of the Beethoven quartets by the Busch quartet, please add the pre-WWII
- Budapest recording of Op 131. While I was an undergraduate I must
- have contributed mightily to wearing out the 78-rpm recordings of this
- performance in alma mama's music library.
-
- Bertram Walsh Mathematics Dep't Rutgers University New Brunswick NJ 08903
-