Each Friday we select a track from a Naxos Music Group album released twenty years ago to provide the accompaniment for five minutes of your downtime.
This week’s pick from the Dynamic label (CDS484) presents the finale from Beethoven’s String Quintet, Op. 4, published in 1796. It’s actually an arrangement for strings of an earlier work by Beethoven, the Octet in E flat major for two oboes, two clarinets, two horns and two bassoons, composed in 1792. To refer to it as an arrangement, however, is somewhat diminishing, since Beethoven’s changes to the original score were radical enough to consider the Quintet Op. 4 in many ways as a work in its own right.
String Quintet in E-Flat Major, Op. 4 – Finale: Presto (CDS484)