Atterberg & Rangström String Quartets from cpo

[Alan Howe]

Details here:
http://www.jpc.de/jpcng/cpo/detail/-/art/kurt-atterberg-streichquartette-op-11-39/hnum/4557465

[eschiss1]

I'd be more pleased with this announcement if it contained one of Atterberg's other quartets (too) (his as yet unrecorded(?)- though available from STIM- Op.39 in D major- comes to mind.) Anyhow, thanks!

[mjkFendrich]

I'd be more pleased with this announcement if it contained one of Atterberg's other quartets (too) (his as yet unrecorded(?)- though available from STIM- Op.39 in D major- comes to mind.)

If you look at the details of the cpo announcement (Alan has included the link), you'll see that op.39 is included on this new CD!
Op.2 (Qt. No.1) and Op.46 (Vars.&Fugue) are missing, however.

[eschiss1]

... oh my. Thank you. That (first part) -is- good news (well, unless it's a horrible work, but I've skimmed a score downloadable for such purposes from STIM/Svensk Musik - they have quite a few such things downloadable for free from their site (full scores and partial, mostly 20th century), to encourage purchase of other things, of course - and it -looks- neat, and worth hearing!)

[Holger]

Op.2 (Qt. No.1) and Op.46 (Vars.&Fugue) are missing, however.

Just a note on the quartet Op. 2 as I now got my copy of that CD and had a look at the liner notes. In fact, the new CD more or less does give us a recording of the Op. 2 quartet after all. This early quartet had been a work in the usual four movements. Later on, however, Atterberg wasn't satisfied with its outer movements any more, feeling they were too much indebted to Brahms' Third Symphony and Dvořák's New World Symphony, so that he finally destroyed them. However, he reused the middle movements later but composed two new outer movements for them (the new first movement actually makes use of material from the first movement of Op. 2). The result was then called Op. 39. So in a way, Op. 39 is a sort of revision of Op. 2, which is not preserved itself on the other hand. It thus makes sense that the Swedish MIC labels Op. 39 Quartet No. 1 and Op. 16 Quartet No. 2. It also implies that the new disc actually gives us all full-scale string quartets by Atterberg.