While it is no longer necessary to introduce Zemlinsky as Schoenberg’s brother-in-law and musical mentor, rather than as a composer in his own right, it is still interesting to hear programmes which compare and contrast their compositional developments. This well-performed disc confirms that, although after a similar start the two grew ever further apart, Zemlinsky’s later music was much more than the unadventurous outpouring of a lesser talent.
Written in the mid-1890s, Zemlinsky’s Two Movements for string quintet are accomplished and personable studies whose obvious echoes of various late-romantic masters enhance rather than diminish their appeal. Much the same can be said (though the influences are slightly different) of Schoenberg’s D major Quartet of 1897, even more impressive as a student piece in avoiding any hint of that diffuseness in which Zemlinsky occasionally indulged.
By 1929, the date of the Two Movements for string quartet, Zemlinsky was still a late-romantic, though with an intensity suggesting familiarity with Berg’s more recent pieces, like the Lyric Suite (dedicated to Zemlinsky). At that time, Schoenberg was already well on the road that would lead to the fragmented, atonal expressionism of the String Trio, exceptional though that work is in its impatience with the kind of links to classical and romantic traditions that Schoenberg usually admitted.
The Corda Quartet are a well-blended team, conveying the full emotional range of these works in recordings that are, if anything, too warm in acoustic, with insufficient separation between the players. A greater sense of distance would have added to the range and clarity of dramatic expression in Schoenberg’s Trio, but its absence is not a serious drawback, and overall I prefer these versions of the two Schoenberg scores to those by the Arditti Quartet. I look forward to hearing the Corda players in Schoenberg’s numbered quartets – and Zemlinsky’s too.'