PF2023 Brochure - Flipbook - Page 15
EVENT 3
HEATH QUARTET
Anton Webern Langsamer Satz
Cecilia McDowall The case of the unanswered Wire
Benjamin Britten String Quartet No 2 in C, Op 36
The Heath Quartet
The Heath Quartet’s residency at the 2021 Presteigne Festival is made possible with the generous support of
The Fidelio Charitable Trust
Recorded at St Andrew’s Church, Presteigne on 27 & 28 August 2021
Recordiwyd yn Eglwys Sant Andreas, Llanadras ar 27 & 28 Awst 2021
Camera, sound recording and editing Simon Vout, Orientis Recording Services ∙ Executive Producer George Vass
Camera, recordio sain a golygu Simon Vout, Orientis Recording Services ∙ Cynhyrchydd gweithredol George Vass
ANTON WEBERN (1883-1945)
Langsamer Satz
corpus of over 100 student compositions and
exercises that he completed during his time with
Schoenberg, of which most remains unpublished.
This single movement, published in 1965, a tripartite song structure with a coda, inhabits the
intense, nocturnal, emotionally charged landscape
of his teacher’s Verklärte Nacht composed six years
earlier. Its polyphonic lines reveal a close study
of Brahms, while the intoxicating, late-Romantic
harmonies are a path that Webern would soon
leave behind.
In 1905, Austrian composer Anton Webern was
head over heels in love with his cousin Wilhelmine
Mörtl, with whom he shared a walking vacation to
Lower Austria, west of Vienna. The twenty-one-yearold composer wrote effusive diary entries about
their idyllic time together. Webern composed the
lushly romantic Langsamer Satz (slow movement)
in Vienna that summer, having almost completed
the first of four years intensive private composition
study with Arnold Schoenberg. It was one of a
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