Alexander Zemlinsky, whose sister married Arnold Schoenberg and who lost Alma Schindler to Mahler (and, in the words of Tom Lehrer, practically all of the other top creative men in Central Europe), was at the center of the Second Viennese School. The fact that he never completely discarded tonality did not endear him to those who saw musical history as a linear forward development, but that time has passed, and he's worth a reevaluation to which this fine set of his string quartets may make an important contribution. There ...
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Alexander Zemlinsky, whose sister married Arnold Schoenberg and who lost Alma Schindler to Mahler (and, in the words of Tom Lehrer, practically all of the other top creative men in Central Europe), was at the center of the Second Viennese School. The fact that he never completely discarded tonality did not endear him to those who saw musical history as a linear forward development, but that time has passed, and he's worth a reevaluation to which this fine set of his string quartets may make an important contribution. There are several earlier sets, but this one by the Brodsky Quartet, nicely recorded at Suffolk's Potton Hall, may emerge as the standard. Among its advantages is the presence of a student work, the String Quartet in E minor of 1893, that disappeared after it was rejected by the programming committee of the Vienna Tonkünstlerverein, a fate it shared, incidentally, with Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht. Both this work and Zemlinsky's official quartet debut, the String Quartet No. 1 in A major,...
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