Aris Quartett

In addition to Mozart's Adagio and Fugue, the Frankfurt Aris Quartett presents two extremely important works from the quartet literature. The fact that Dmitri Shostakovich's third quartet deals with the fate of Russia during the Second World War has been deduced from the fact that the individual movements originally bore headings referring to the war, which the composer later removed. According to another interpretation, the sequence and basic mood of the five-movement work follows the tradition of Jewish wedding music, which is also divided into five parts. In any case, it is a work of epic character and one of the most important of the composer's fifteen quartets.
‘Free, but lonely‘, this motto of the violinist Joseph Joachim forms the nucleus of Johannes Brahms’ second string quartet. Its use in the tone sequence F-A-E right at the beginning of the first movement and at the end of the final movement indicates a secret dedication to his friend Joseph Joachim. The fact that Brahms found the composition of this quartet (and its sister, the first quartet in C minor) so difficult that he called it a ‘pincer birth’ is not apparent in the work, as the motifs and development seem so cohesive and coherent. He later confessed that the work was so laborious because he had ‘respect for the printer's ink’.
(Frankfurter Museums-Gesellschaft e.V.)