Great Chamber Music / Various

Great Chamber Music / Various

• Great Chamber Music
• Product type: ABIS MUSIC
• Brand: NAXOS

This collection of great chamber music brings together nine giants of music in works which reveal their most immediate and individual expressive worlds: proof if <br>ever any was needed that less can be much, much more. <br>The term 'chamber music' broadly implies music on an intimate scale performed by a limited number of musicians. The heart of civilized 18th-century European <br>musical culture is best represented by that most perfect of forms the string quartet, developed by Haydn and Mozart into models of elegance and expressive balance. <br>Embracing instruments new for his time, Mozart's chamber music also resulted in sublime masterpieces such as the Clarinet Quintet, but it was Beethoven who <br>expanded the length and complexity of the string quartet to its limits. Beethoven left an indelible mark of progress and change on every genre of music, and both <br>the 'Archduke' Trio and 'Kreutzer' Sonata are milestones in chamber music history.<br>Beethoven s romantic independence of spirit and powerfully personal musical language was carried forward by Schubert and Mendelssohn, both of whom <br>introduced emotion-enhancing literary sentiments into their expressive range. The symphonic proportions of Brahms's Clarinet Quintet places it at the pinnacle of <br>the classical line through Mozart and Beethoven, but romantic ideals in music were already being applied to the cause of national identity. Antonin Dvorak's 'Dumky' <br>Trio takes its name from a ballad of lament, integrating national dance elements to create a distinctive Czech and Bohemian flavor. The move away from German <br>stylistic examples by the Russian 'mighty handful' can be heard in Borodin's soulful String Quartet No. 2. Innovation in chamber music can be found everywhere, <br>but there are few such works as striking as Cesar Franck s Violin Sonata, a flawless synthesis of classical proportion and the spirit of romanticism in its cyclic <br>development of a single theme.