The members of the Quatuor Arod contribute notes to this recording of Schubert string quartets, and they give an idea of what to expect: the String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, D. 810 ("Death and the Maiden"), is termed a "full-blown tone poem that will keep [the audience] spellbound for three quarters of an hour." The quartet has the chops to carry off this concept, and they fill it out with sharp delineation of the personages in Schubert's song in the first movement. One might even call their interpretation operatic, so ...
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The members of the Quatuor Arod contribute notes to this recording of Schubert string quartets, and they give an idea of what to expect: the String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, D. 810 ("Death and the Maiden"), is termed a "full-blown tone poem that will keep [the audience] spellbound for three quarters of an hour." The quartet has the chops to carry off this concept, and they fill it out with sharp delineation of the personages in Schubert's song in the first movement. One might even call their interpretation operatic, so episodic and dramatic is the group's approach. The readings are intense throughout, not only in "Death and the Maiden" but in the single-movement Quartettsatz, D. 703, and in the inexplicably neglected String Quartet No. 4 in C major, D. 46. This strikingly ambitious work by the 16-year-old Schubert grasps the weight of Beethoven like nothing else around in 1813, and the Quatuor Arod justifies their high-powered reading as they careen around the work's sharp turns with tight control....
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