Ludwig Thuille: The String Quartets

PRODUCT DESCRIPTION
Champs Hill Records continues its survey of the neglected music of Ludwig Thuille with a new recording of his String Quartets Nos 1 & 2, performed by the Allegri Quartet.

Leader Ofer Falk describes in the booklet how he came to know Thuille's music through a chance encounter with a score for one of the Quintets (which the Allegri Quartet have recorded for Champs Hill Records, available on CHRCD002) - music left behind in a piano stool given to a friend.

Ofer says: "Here was a true masterpiece. A creation by a previously unknown (at least to us) yet masterful composer at the height of his prowess. The style was late romantic. The structure was of the grandest of scales, yet traditional and flawlessly constructed. The harmonic language had elements of Brahms, Bruckner and Wagner, but to our ears it most resembled the music (early to mid period) of Richard Strauss."

The Allegri Quartet are Britain's oldest chamber group, as they celebrate their 60th anniversary. "The current line-up plays with elegance and cleanness of detail. Avoiding heavy gesture in favour of nimble energy" - Fiona Maddocks, Independent on Sunday - June 2013

Born in Bolzano (Bozen), capital of Southern Tirol, Ludwig Thuille lived and created in fin de siècle Munich and was one of the leading forces in pre World-War I Germany. His operas were successfully performed in central opera houses from Moscow to New York. His vocal and instrumental pieces were often performed in Europe's main concert venues. His treatise on harmony (Harmonielehre) became a standard textbook throughout Europe and many of the continent's musicians were brought up on Thuille's harmonic thoughts and conceptions.

REVIEW
Thuille is remembered, if at all, as the Munich composer who wasn t Richard Strauss. Three years older than the rising genius and an admiring companion, Thuille followed Strauss to his first conducting post in Meiningen and sank many a half-litre with him in the town's taverns after dark. They were likely lads of the 1880s. While Strauss composed tone poems, Thuille wrote operas six of them, well received though never bursting any boundaries or shocking a duchess. Unlike the genius, Thuille wrote within the limits of a small imagination and strictly on the right side of convention. After his early death in 1907, aged 46, he was quickly forgotten. Unjustly so, on the strength of his gentle, engaging pair of string quartets, unearthed only in recent years. Composed in Tuille's late teens, the quartets are grounded in the language of middle-period Brahms with flowing melodies and polite thematic exchanges. You feel safe and warm at this well-laid table, knowing that one course will follow the next in fixed order and without excess. This is charming music, exquisitely played by the Allegri Quartet in the music room at Champs Hill, the audiophile venue in Sussex from which this label takes its name. The music may not totally arrest the attention but it caresses the outer ear in a very pleasant manner. If it does not bear concentrated listening, it will afford ideal accompaniment to dinner party conversation. --Sinfini Music, 27/4/14

The latest instalment of Champs Hill Records's survey of Ludwig Thuille's chamber music and songs focuses on his two string quartets, together with the Quartett-Satz, the manuscript of which was recently discovered in the Munich State Library by Ofer Falk, leader of the Allegri Quartet, who perform all three works here. Thuille's quartets were all written by the time he was 20, before he moved on to the larger forms of the quintet and sextet, on which his reputation primarily rests. Both the First, in A major, and the Quartett-Satz are a bit too self-consciously modelled on Schubert, though Brahms's influence is apparent in the Second Quartet in G major, a work of quite astonishing beauty. Ending with its slow movement and seemingly lacking an upbeat finale, it is often described as unfinished. But the Allegris' perfectly proportioned performance suggests a cogent artistic statement, complete in itself, to which nothing need be added. **** --Guardian, 8/5/14

Mendlessohn for the late-Romantic generation. Ludwig Thuille's post-Classical tunefulness is memorably captured by the Allegri's gleaming precision and affectionate poise. **** --BBC Music Magazine, Aug'14

1: Allegro Moderato
2: Adagio Molto
3: Scherzo - Vivo
4: Finale - Quasi Presto
5: Quartett-Satz
6: Allegro
7: Menuetto Allegretto
8: Andante

Composer: Ludwig Thuille

Number of Discs: 1

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