Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings? Not this time: in this 2006 recording by London's Nash Ensemble, Metamorphosen is played by a string septet: pairs of violins, violas, and cellos plus a single bass. The arrangement -- or, rather, the realization -- by Rudolf Leopold was made from Strauss' initial sketch for the work as a string septet found in 1990 -- 45 years after its composition. Aside from retaining the original septet's closing modulation, Leopold's seven-string realization is faithful to the 23-string version in ...
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Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings? Not this time: in this 2006 recording by London's Nash Ensemble, Metamorphosen is played by a string septet: pairs of violins, violas, and cellos plus a single bass. The arrangement -- or, rather, the realization -- by Rudolf Leopold was made from Strauss' initial sketch for the work as a string septet found in 1990 -- 45 years after its composition. Aside from retaining the original septet's closing modulation, Leopold's seven-string realization is faithful to the 23-string version in every particular except of course texture and density. In this performance by the Nash Ensemble, the strength of the sonorities doubles for the loss of weight and the intensity of the lines more than compensates for the loss of density. But beyond the arrangement and the ensemble's playing, it is the Nash's extremely passionate interpretation, the way they arch lines, drive climaxes and ultimately give way to stoic grief in the final pages, that makes their performance so convincing....
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