While it is difficult to speak about "early" and "late" works with a composer who lived barely three decades, the compositions of Franz Schubert matured so greatly over his short lifespan that a clear difference can still be heard. This Audite album, featuring the Mandelring Quartet, clearly demonstrates this with Schubert's antipodal quartets. The E flat Quartet, composed at only 16 years of age, is a clear hat-tip to Schubert's august predecessors Haydn, Mozart, and to some extent, Beethoven. The famous "Death and the ...
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While it is difficult to speak about "early" and "late" works with a composer who lived barely three decades, the compositions of Franz Schubert matured so greatly over his short lifespan that a clear difference can still be heard. This Audite album, featuring the Mandelring Quartet, clearly demonstrates this with Schubert's antipodal quartets. The E flat Quartet, composed at only 16 years of age, is a clear hat-tip to Schubert's august predecessors Haydn, Mozart, and to some extent, Beethoven. The famous "Death and the Maiden" Quartet, written only 11 years later, shows the extent of Schubert's extreme personal and compositional maturation. The Mandelring Quartet performs these two contrasting pieces with notable amounts of intensity and angularity. While the result of this approach yields energetic, gripping performances, it also has the tendency of making Schubert sound more like Beethoven. Some listeners may miss Schubert's intense lyricism, particularly in slow movements. Intonation is generally...
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