Ludwig van Beethoven, Anton Webern, Johann Sebastian Bach, Danish String Quartet

Prism V brings the Danish String Quartet's project to its close after some eight years of work. Each volume connects a Bach fugue to one of Beethoven's late quartets, and that quartet to a work by a later composer. In the players' words, "a beam of music is split through Beethoven's prism". The last instalment centres on Ludwig van Beethoven's String Quartet No. 16 in F major, Op. 135, with Anton Webern's early String Quartet of 1905 and two late works by Johann Sebastian Bach as frame.

The quartet are Frederik Øland and Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen (violins), Asbjørn Nørgaard (viola) and Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin (cello). Prism III and IV had been taped at the Reitstadel in Neumarkt, while this one was recorded in June 2021 in the Festsal of KFUM/KFUK in Copenhagen. Markus Heiland was the engineer and Manfred Eicher the producer, and Paul Griffiths again wrote the liner notes alongside a note by the quartet.

The programme opens with the chorale prelude Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit, BWV 668, which tradition says Bach dictated on his deathbed. In Griffiths' words it "opens up like a flower". Op. 135 moves from a light Allegretto and a gruff Vivace to the slow variations of the Assai lento. Its finale begins with the Grave introduction before turning to a bright Allegro. Webern wrote his single-movement quartet while a student of Schoenberg, and Beethoven was one of its models. It is cast in three sections played without a break, and its eighteen minutes still breathe late-Romantic warmth. The disc ends with Contrapunctus 14 from The Art of Fugue, which breaks off where Bach's manuscript does.

In The New York Times, David Allen wrote that across the series "the control of sonority and articulation on show is absolute, even as the range of both is vast". Paul Riley in BBC Music Magazine liked the choice to leave the unfinished fugue "hanging in the air" rather than complete it. He summed up the album as "a potent reading, potently illuminated by the contextualising Bach and Webern".

CD edition, ECM New Series 2565, first released in April 2023. It completes the five-volume Prism series that began with Prism I in 2018.