Strauss, Richard - Metamorphosen / Piano Quartet - Nash Ensemble (The)

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This is The Nash Ensemble at its very best—full-blooded performances of red-meat chamber music.

Metamorphosen can in some ways be regarded as Richard Strauss’s heart-rending reaction against the wartime
destruction of German culture and heritage. Completed in the spring of 1945, the work is at once angry, poignant and
intensely beautiful. The version performed here is derived from Strauss’s original score for seven stringed instruments
(he later expanded it to twenty-three), and incorporates the revisions to the closing bars made in subsequent versions.

The Piano Quartet is an early work, composed some sixty years before the valedictory Metamorphosen. In it, one
contemporary critic noted, Strauss ‘shows himself a better Brahmsian than Brahms’. Strauss was clearly proud of this
early composition—he performed in the premiere—and we should not dismiss it purely on the grounds of its coming
from the pen of a twenty-one year old.

Capriccio also predates Metamorphosen, but only by four years. This last of Strauss’s ground-breaking operas opens with
an extended movement for string sextet—this is no arrangement—as the composer character Flamand competes with
his poet rival for the hand of the delectable Madeleine. The result is of such searingly intense emotion that Strauss
successfully granted the 1942 premiere to a hated Nazi official in return for safe passage out of Germany for his son
and part-Jewish wife.

Some of the Nash Ensemble previous releases:
FRANCIS POULENC
The Complete Chamber Music 2 (CDA 67255)
GRAMOPHONE EDITOR’S CHOICE
BBC CD REVIEW DISC OF THE MONTH

CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS
Chamber Music 2 (CDA 67431)
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE CHAMBER DISC OF THE MONTH

JOSEF SUK
Chamber Music Compact (CDA 67448)
‘All of the performances on this excellently recorded disc are exemplary’
(BBC Music Magazine)


The Nash Ensemble
Richard Strauss
1 Metamorphosen version for string septet

Piano Quartet in C minor Op 13
2 Allegro
3 Scherzo: Presto – Molto meno mosso – Tempo I
4 Andante
5 Finale: Vivace

6 Prelude to Capriccio Op 85 for string sextet