Gyorgy Ligeti, Earle Brown, Wolf Rosenberg

Featuring: Lasalle Quartet

condition (record/cover): NM / NM  | Three string quartets written for the LaSalle Quartet, three entirely different answers to what a string quartet could still be in the 1960s. György Ligeti's Second Quartet (1967-68), dedicated to the LaSalle, is one of the supreme works of the century - five movements whose tempo markings read like stage directions for a psychological drama: Allegro nervoso, Sostenuto, molto calmo, Come un meccanismo di precisione, Presto furioso, brutale, tumultuoso, Allegro con delicatezza. Ligeti's micropolyphony, the dense webs of Atmosphères and Lontano, stripped down to four instruments and made to articulate with a precision and nervous energy that the orchestral works deliberately avoided. The premiere, Baden-Baden, December 14, 1969, established the LaSalle as the definitive Ligeti quartet - a status this recording confirms absolutely.

Earle Brown's String Quartet (1965), commissioned by Südwestfunk Baden-Baden for the Donaueschinger Musiktage, is Brown's most concentrated attempt to bring the open-form thinking of the Available Forms works and the graphic notation of December 1952 into the most traditional of chamber music formats. The overall form is fixed but areas of flexibility remain within the inner structures - a balance between compositional identity and what Brown called "performer process" spontaneity. The LaSalle premiered it at Donaueschingen on October 16, 1965, and their performance here has the quality Brown always sought: the conversational spontaneity of jazz within a composed framework, each performance unique but always identifiably the same piece.

Wolf Rosenberg's Third Quartet (1960-61) is the discovery on this record. Rosenberg (1915 Dresden - 1996 Frankfurt) is one of the most remarkable figures of twentieth-century German musical life, but almost entirely as a critic and broadcaster rather than a composer - his radio series Aus dem Musikarchiv on Südwestfunk, presenting historical recordings from the shellac era, ran from 1972 to 1992 and achieved cult status; his 1968 book Die Krise der Gesangskunst remains a touchstone. His biography reads like a compressed history of the Jewish-European twentieth century: orphaned young in Dresden, raised by his grandfather in Berlin, studied philosophy in Florence and Bologna, then composition with Stefan Wolpe in Jerusalem. After the war he returned to Germany, taught briefly in East Berlin before fleeing to the West under suspicion of Zionist espionage, and settled in Munich. His compositional output is tiny - electronic works and chamber music, two of the three quartets written for the LaSalle - but the Third Quartet, heard alongside Ligeti and Brown, more than holds its ground.

LP. Deutsche Grammophon 2561 040, 1970. DGG Avantgarde series. Walter Levin (first violin), Henry Meyer (second violin), Peter Kamnitzer (viola), Jack Kirstein (cello). Recorded December 1969, Plenarsaal der Akademie der Wissenschaft, München. Artistic supervision Dr. Manfred Richter (Ligeti, Brown), Rainer Brock (Rosenberg).