Bruckner & Klose String Quartets

Quatuor Diotima (former ensemble-in-residence at University of Chicago) celebrates the bicentennial anniversary of Anton Bruckner with a recording of his String Quartet in C minor, Rondo in C minor and, new to the library, the Theme with Variations in E-Flat, alongside the String Quartet in E-Flat from his pupil Friedrich Klose. Bruckner wrote these pieces as composition exercises, yet they foreshadow the originality and power of his later works, as well as pay tribute to the glorious Viennese quartet tradition. Like Bruckner, Klose strongly sympathized with Wagner and the proponents of program music, and chamber music had not appealed to him very much. Sarcastically, he subtitled it a “tribute paid in four installments to my stern German schoolmasters.”