String teachers have long turned to the First Album series to fulfill the need for fun, educational first-year solo and ensemble music. Familiar classics and original works are presented, each in elementary first position. All material has been carefully edited and bowed.
First Quartet Album - easy arrangements of 20 classics by Haydn, Beethoven, Schumann, Mozart and more
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The composition cost him his sleep. In October 1842, when Schumann had finished his piano quintet in a short period of time, he was physically and emotionally drained. The work in no way reflects this, quite the contrary. “Full of strength and freshness” said Clara Schumann of the new composition, as well as “extremely brilliant and effective.” Even Richard Wagner added his voice to the great wave of admiration. Thus op. 44 soon became one of Schumann's most successful compositions, which today is still a jewel in chamber music literature. If the quartet reminds one of a piano concerto with orchestra in string quartet format at times, this is explained by the fact that it was intended for Clara's repertoire. The work was also dedicated to this brilliant pianist.
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After a twelve-year interval, Dvorák once again turned his attention to the string quartet in summer 1893. He had been musical director in New York since autumn 1892 and spent the summer in Spillville (Iowa) where a group of Czech immigrants had settled, thus making him feel at home. The beautiful natural surroundings led him to write this unconventional string quartet in the tradition of Beethoven's “Pastoral” - even down to the imitation of birdcalls. Since the first performances, certain rhythmic and melodic characteristics have been traced back to the influences of the folk music of Native Americans and African Americans, which led to the soon popular work being called the “American Quartet”. For the first time since 1955, the quartet is once again being published in an Urtext edition.
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Parts only for: 2 violins, viola and cello.
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Johannes Brahms's Piano Quintet is not only one of the mightiest works in its genre but a climax in his chamber music oevre. This new volume adopts the definitive text from the New Complete Edition of Brahms's Works.
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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 inception of the three quartets op. 59 (1806) and the quartet op. 74 (1809/10). In the quartets op. 59, Beethoven sprinkled several Russian folksong themes – an homage to Prince Razumovsky, who had commissioned the works.This is why the pieces are often called the “Russian Quartets.” The next quartet, op. 74 in E flat major, was also given a nickname: thanks to extended pizzicato passages in the first movement, it is frequently called the “Harp Quartet.” The F minor Quartet op. 95, in turn, bears the autograph title “Quartett serioso.” All five quartets are mature masterworks which demand high interpretative and technical mastery.
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The string quartet is generally considered as the chamber-music genre of the classical era: invented by Haydn, elaborated by Haydn and Mozart, and brought to its compositional peak by Beethoven. All later quartet composers had to measure themselves against the works of these three masters. This applies first and foremost to Mendelssohn, who has always been called a “classical romantic.” His Quartet in A minor op. 13 in particular is said to have strong Beethovenian stylistic traits. It was composed in late summer and fall 1827, shortly after Beethoven's late quartets appeared in print, works that Mendelssohn was no doubt familiar with. The Quartet in E flat major op. 12 was written two years later, during Mendelssohn's first tour of England. A textually identical score of the two quartets is published in Henle's Study Score series (HN 9270).
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Study Score. (Parts: 50489786)
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“Masterly and full of new ideas”: thus the Swedish ambassadorial secretary Silverstolpe when he first heard these pieces in 1797. Haydn's friend, the music historian Charles Burney, reported in 1799 that he had “never taken greater pleasure in instrumental music.” Our new edition of these six works, including the famous “Emperor Quartet,” follows the text of the complete edition prepared by the Haydn Institute in Cologne. Both the study edition (HN 9214) and the set of parts (HN 214) have highly informative notes on the source materials and alternative readings. Fold-out pages in the parts allow for optimum page turns.
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The study edition complements the parts of the String Quartets op. 20 that have already been published in Henle Urtext (HN 208); a new preface by Christin Heitmann provides illuminating background information. Haydn did not assign the nickname “Sun Quartets”: it alludes to an edition of the time, in which the title page was decorated with a rising sun. The Quartets op. 20 are the last series in a group of earlier string quartets, but are clearly ahead of their time. The demanding fugues which close three of the six quartets are a particular structural feature.
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“Spirited”, “dramatic”, “highly expressive”, and “masterly” are among the comments made upon Mendelssohn's String Quartets op. 44 no. 1-3. He wrote them in 1837/1838, at a very happy time: he had just married, was becoming world famous, and had been appointed director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Concerts, one of the highest positions in the German musical world at that time. The quartets were written in the order 2 (in E minor), 3 (in E flat major) and 1 (in D major). Mendelssohn himself considered the Quartet in D major as his best – perhaps a reason why he placed it at the beginning of the collection.
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Pulitzer Prize winning composer George Walker's first string quartet was composed in 1946 after his graduation from the Curtis Institute of Music and debut as a prodigious piano soloist with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. The first movement presents strongly contrasting themes in a clearly defined sonata form. The second Adagio movement would later become the basis of Walker's most popular work, Lyric for Strings. The third movement is a large-scaled Rondo which closes with a reflective coda.
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Brahms had already composed over 20 string quartets (he confessed to a friend that he had burnt all of that “stuff”) before he finally presented his Opus 51 to the public. In the end only three surviving works managed to withstand his high self-criticism; numerous layers of corrections bear witness to his struggle with each detail. We are now publishing the two passionate dark Quartets op. 51 separately from the rather more lively Opus 67. The basis for this edition is the volume in the New Complete Edition of Brahms' works, published in 2004 by Henle, for which previously missing sources in a Swiss bequest were consulted for the first time.
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An excellent contemporary string quartet by the innovative Philip Glass.
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The music world associates Verdi's name so obviously with his operatic output that his contributions to other genres can easily be overlooked. His only chamber work owes its existence to an enforced break in Naples in spring 1873, when opera rehearsals had had to be postponed. To the astonishment of those around him, Verdi used the time to write a string quartet. Despite clearly orienting himself around the quartets of Viennese Classicism, Verdi succeeds here in making an independent and ingenious contribution to the genre. With its many melodic, harmonic and contrapuntal subtleties it leaves no doubt as to its author's elevated compositional intentions.
This Henle Urtext edition is based on the Italian first edition, though important secondary sources such as the autograph score and the French first edition have also been consulted.
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Composed December 1933-February 1934, Britten's Simple Symphony was based on material he wrote between the ages of nine and twelve. 18 minutes.
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Franz Schubert transformed five song melodies from his rich ouput of Lieder into instrumental music. The song “The Trout” from 1817 served as a theme for the variations in his Quintet D. 667 for piano, violin, viola, violoncello and double bass, one of chamber music's most popular works. The piece's sunny mood – it sounds much more cheerful than Schubert's other chamber music – comes across like an echo of the felicitous summer months of 1819. The then twenty-two-year-old Schubert passes these in convivial company at Steyr in Upper Austria, and subsequently set to work composing. The present Urtext edition largely follows the Viennese first edition, which likely reproduces the original version of the now lost autograph. In addition, it takes into account the only manuscript source of this work, a copy by Schubert's friend Albert Stadler. Musicians everywhere will appreciate the optimally-placed page turns in the individual parts!
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Arrangements of three of Bolcom's famous piano rags: Poltergeist, Graceful Ghost, and Incineratorag.
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Haydn allowed about ten years to pass before composing a new cycle of string quartets after opus 20: the so-called “Russian Quartets.” This is the first series of quartets that we know he wrote with publication in mind. “They are in a completely new and special manner,” he wrote in several letters, and he was certainly not just referring to the fact that “Scherzi” replaced the minuets for the first time. Music lovers particularly appreciate the melodic ideas; thus the rich ornamentation of the main motif of op. 33,3, gave the quartet its nickname “Bird Quartet.”
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The composer describes this six-movement suite as drawing “inspiration from the idea of mestizaje as envisioned by the Peruvian writer José María Arguedas, where cultures can coexist without the subjugation of one by the other. As such, this piece mixes elements from the western classical and Andean folk music traditions.” First performed by the Chiara Quartet at South Hadley, Massachusetts, 2001.
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Beethoven's Op. 135, one of the last works he composed, is equally famous for its compositional clarity and for the inadequacy of previous editions. Theproblem lies in the surviving sources, for Beethoven's autograph score contains a great many contradictions compared to his autograph set of parts. In 1827, after Beethoven's death, the German publisher of the first edition posthumously ironed out these discrepancies as he saw fit, and later editions simply adopted his interventions. Rainer Cadenbach's volume is the first attempt to produce an authoritative text for Op. 135. Beethoven's contradictory formulations are laid bare, allowing musicians to make their own decisions. This ambitious new edition also finds room for ideal page turns.
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