Alexander Goehr

condition (record/cover): NM / EX+
Insert included.

One of the more searching documents of Alexander Goehr's mature compositional voice - a voice that had, by the early 1970s, found its own independent position between the serial inheritance and a deeper engagement with the tonal and formal traditions from which he refused to sever his connection entirely. Goehr's formation - at the Royal Manchester College, then in Paris with Messiaen and Loriod, then in Cologne - had given him a perspective on the post-war avant-garde that was simultaneously internal and critically detached: he knew from the inside what serialism had achieved and what it had foreclosed, and his response was not the rejection of technique but its careful re-grounding in historical procedure.

The Law Of The Quadrille Is Clear and the String Quartet No. 3 represent this synthesis at its most focused. The quartet in particular - a genre to which Goehr returned throughout his career with the seriousness it demanded - deploys a contrapuntal rigor whose immediate ancestors are as much Beethoven and Bartók as Schoenberg or Berg, the historical chain felt not as constraint but as a living resource. An important Wergo document of a composer who remained, in the British context, an exemplary figure of intellectual independence. Wergo, WER 60093.