Antonin Dvorak- String Quartet No. 3

Product Description This volume from the Vlach Quartet Prague' acclaimed Dvo?Ak String Quartet series presents the symphonically-conceived Third String Quartet of 1869/70, a richly rewarding work. Despite the lingering influence of Liszt and Wagner, the inclusion of Review Perhaps more than any other single work Dvo?ák wrote, his D-Major String Quartet, B 18, underscores a point I've made about the composer in the past, which is that there exists an inverse (if not perverse) relationship in his music between the naturalness of its inspiration and the protraction of its material. There are other, more direct ways, of expressing this axiom, as in the less he had to say the longer he took to say it; or, there is simply the old cliché of beating a dead horse. But don't take my word for it; read what note author Keith Anderson has to say: "The Quartet in D Major, at one time given the numbering op. 9, was never published and perhaps never played in the composer's lifetime. It has a disadvantage in its length, leading the editor of the complete edition to suggest a number of cuts to reduce playing time by nearly a half. There is no doubt that, apart from practical considerations of concert performance, the work is hardly concise, a possible reason for Dvo?ák's decision to reject it." To this I would add that not only is the work "hardly concise," it's possibly Dvo?ák's least inspired and most soporific composition--chloroform in its fourth physical state. And you thought Bach's Goldberg Variations was supposed to be a remedy for insomnia! But in keeping with my hypothesis, it's also the longest of the composer's 14 numbered quartets--approaching 64 minutes in this recording, but almost 70 in a recording I have with the Prague Quartet--and almost certainly the longest string quartet of any written prior to the 20th century, with the possible exception of the string quartet version of Haydn's Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross. "Divine length" is but a euphemism for Schubert's similar bouts of compositional incontinence. Though the Quartet is laid out in the expected four movements, the first movement in particular, a sprawling, rambling essay in sonata-allegro form, is so diffuse and its themes so nondescript that it's difficult to follow its nearly 25-minute circuitous spinning. There's a certain prettiness to the Andantino that follows, but its wanderi