Intimate Voices: String Quartets of Grieg, Sibelius, and Nielsen

CML call number: CD/CLASSICAL/Emerson
Bernard Holland wrote in the New York Times, 5/1/06: "The real Grieg, in all its magical lyricism, found its place in the piano pieces and songs, and it peeps out as well from the rhetoric of the G minor String Quartet. The first audiences in 1878 liked the piece, but Grieg does not seem to have satisfied his German colleagues' desire for more depth of complication: too much melody and harmony for them, and not enough of anything else. The quartet as a whole is full of sudden shifts in mood, relieved by the Romanza movement's gentle dance in triple time. In the finale, the dancing turns wild. Sibelius, rather mysteriously, called his D minor quartet 'Intimate Voices' [i.e., Voces intimae, which can also mean 'inmost voices']. … In formal terms, the five movements offer a kind of circular symmetry, with the third, Adagio di molto, as a center. Sibelius's chamber music sings with the same lonely voice and near-moral severity of texture by which we know his symphonies. The Nielsen piece … was written for the funeral of a young friend in 1910. … The Emerson String Quartet plays here with its usual sleek intensity and deeply cultured touch."