As the opus numbers suggest, the five string trios are relatively early works. Beethoven had sent opus 3 to print in early 1796, and in the same year, he began his compositional work on the Serenade o...
The five string quartets in this volume are generally designated as Beethoven's 'middle quartets,' even though stylistically they do not all build a closed unit. More than three years lie between the...
More than a few experts and aficionados count Mozart's string trio in E-flat major K. 563 among his most magnificent compositions. This masterwork, entered into Mozart's own catalogue of works on 27 S...
Johannes Brahms's late chamber works are surely among the most splendid music ever written for the clarinet. In the last years of his life, Brahms seems to have become weary of composing - but fortuna...
'In the evening we played Robert's E-flat major Quartet for the first time ... and I was once again truly delighted at this beautiful and so youthful work', enthused Clara Schumann in 1842. In prepara...
No serious musician and no serious orchestra can ignore this new Urtext edition of a major work of concerto literature, since the music text frequently diverges from that of previous editions. All the...
This Trio's unusual scoring for horn, violin and piano prompted speculation early on about a possible background to it that had no connection with music. Brahms's biographer Max Kalbeck saw in it a la...
Max Bruch composed these eight, highly romantic pieces for his son Max Felix, a talented clarinettist. In order to enable the work to be played more widely, Bruch arranged the clarinet part for violin...
> First Urtext edition since 1955 > Dvorák's most famous string quartet After a twelve-year interval, Dvorák once again turned his attention to the string quartet in summer 1893. He had been musical d...
In June 1905, Ravel told a friend shortly before setting off on a long holiday: 'I was terribly busy because of a piece for harp commissioned by the Érard company. I was able to finish it after a fash...