BERG: String Quartet / Lyric Suite / WOLF: Italian Serenade (New Zealand Quartet) (Naxos: 8.557374)

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Alban Berg's two works for string quartet alone are enough to place him with the foremost exponents of the quartet medium during the first half of the twentieth century. The String Quartet, Op. 3, completed in 1910, is both a graduation exercise and also the composer's first extended foray into the non-tonal regions that were then being explored by Schoenberg and Webern. Berg's highly expressive Lyric Suite, inspired by his love-affair with the wife of a family friend, is notable for its unconventional six-movement form, the odd-numbered of which become progressively faster and more disruptive, while the even numbered ones become progressively slower and more intense. Hugo Wolf's Italian Serenade is a lighthearted piece later orchestrated as the first movement of a larger suite.