Quarterly Critic’s Choice
The best and most interesting new releases of the previous three months are awarded a place on the Quarterly Critic’s Choice. Evaluation criteria are artistic quality, repertoire value, presentation, and sound quality. From 2014 onward, the Long Lists are stored directly with each Quarterly Critic’s Choice.
NEW: Long List 2/2024, published on 5th April 2024
Chamber Music
From Vienna to Hollywood
Fritz Kreisler: String Quartet, Erich Wolfgang Korngold: String Quartet No.3, 3 Pieces from »Much ado about nothing« op.11. Hegel Quartet. SACD, Ars Production ARS 38 345 (Note 1)
They were both Viennese prodigies and emigrants in the USA. Her two here presented works were created at historical turning points: Kreisler’s only string quartet in 1919 and Korngold’s third quartet in 1945. The Hegel Quartet from Stuttgart ideally combined these works of survival between grief, memory, hope, and joy of life. The quartet takes the greatest pleasure in all the required stylistic levels of music between heaven and earth. It revels in salon music as well as in construction and espressivo, with which Korngold summons Schönberg’s first string quartet: Vienna remains Vienna, despite Hollywood. For the jury: Lotte Thaler
Chamber Music
Figurations
Béla Bartók: Suite op.14, Maurice Ravel: Ma Mère l’Oye, Walter Feldmann: figurations de mémoire, Claude Debussy: Suite Bergamasque. BlattWerk Quintett. Schweizer Fonogramm 7629999248137 (Direct Sales)
Characterized by work-in-progress: This positive impression is conveyed by the BlattWerk Quintet. It seems as if these musicians reinvent what they put into the music in terms of colors and impulses at the very moment they are playing it. Everything is cleverly arranged, even didactically, yet it makes you want to learn and approach new things. The processing of Ravel’s »Ma Mère l’Oye« looks like a picture book in pastel tones, which opens the senses to all the aerial formations and levitations that Walter Feldmann depicts in the title work: »figurations de mémoire« is a Hubble telescope for ears, through which one can listen into deep, sonorous black holes. For the jury: Julia Kaiser