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 Musiques Suisses catalogue (MGB-6238) is from the Second String Quartet by Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck (1886–1957). He was the son of the painter Alfred Schoeck and briefly a pupil of Max Reger, going on to become one of the leading composers of his generation in Switzerland. The selected string quartet was completed in 1923, shortly after Schoeck had been first confronted with musical Modernism at the chamber music festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music in Salzburg. We hear the work’s Presto finale.
Presto (MGB-6238)