More String Quartets

In the picture are twenty-two albums and box-sets including most (but not all) of the music for string quartet I have on CD. I’ve previously written about the quartets I own on vinyl, while some of the albums shown here were mentioned in my old blog: the Myaskovsky set; the discs of music by George Onslow and Georg Friedrich Haas; and the album by the Cuarteto Casals featuring Ravel’s Quartet in F major, etc.

Among the famous quartets here are sets including the last five of Beethoven’s and of Dvořák’s; Schubert’s last four; Tchaikovsky’s three; and the first thirteen by Shostakovich. A little more obscure are the discs of quartets by Beethoven’s contemporary Anton Reicha; those by another 19th-century composer of Bohemian origin Johann Wenzel Kalliwoda. Meanwhile, from the 20th century, there are quartets by Shostakovich’s lesser-known contemporary Mieczysław Weinberg and an obscurer Soviet composer, German Galynin. As well as the disc including Philip Glass’s quartets nos. 2-5, I have others not in the picture with nos. 6-9. Rather less famous than Glass is his compatriot and near-contemporary Alvin Singleton, who has written at least four quartets.

Women composers aren’t particularly well-represented on my shelves, alas. There’s a disc featuring compositions by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Emilie Mayer and Maddalena Laura Lombardini Sirmen; along with a couple of contemporary ones with quartets by Caroline Shaw and Andrea Tarrodi. The majority of these albums were acquired over the course of the last decade but a couple I’ve had for much longer – I bought the Philip Glass disc a good twenty-five years ago. The latest addition was the album at the botton of the right-hand pile including two of the Austrian/American composer Karl Weigl’s eight quartets.