Toch: Eight String Quartets

Buchberger Quartet, Verdi Quartett

CPO 555351

One of the most ambitious cpo chamber music projects – Ernst Toch’s String Quartets – is now being rereleased in a box of four CDs at a special price! • All eight quartets attest »to the very personal, multifaceted, and compelling musical language of a composer who speaks intimately to his listener, without showy fashions, with classical rigor and intensity« (Klassik-heute). The genre of the string quartet played an absolutely dominant role in Ernst Toch’s oeuvre. He wrote a total of thirteen string quartets; his first five works (all of them lost) belonged to his category; and when he died in 1964, sketches for a new string quartet were found by his bed. cpo has already brought Toch’s symphonies into the spotlight with new recordings of them, and we now turn to the eight extant string quartets by this composer, who was deprived of his well-deserved fame by the brutal politics of the Nazis and developed a highly individual style within the modernism of the twentieth century. This is highly eloquent music, full of subjective expressivity; we cannot listen to it with impartial detachment; it absorbs us completely and enthralls us. The impact of the string quartets is even greater than that of the symphonies. For performers it is the purest tour de force. Two renowned string quartets – the Verdi Quartet and the Buchberger Quartet – have risen to this gigantic challenge.

CD x 4

CPO

3/2/20

761203535125