Unlike
Bruckner
's
String Quintet in F minor
of 1878, which was a mature work, the
pieces on this 2024 release by the
Quatuor Diotima
are student works. They have seldom been performed, and the big news here is the presence of an actual
world-recorded premiere, the
Theme with Variations in E flat major
. A theme and variations might be the most un-Brucknerian form one can imagine, and the annotations for this release by the Bruckner Center of Linz purport to find traces of the later
in the 1862
String Quartet in C minor
. However, the theme and variations, with their broad opening melody, actually feel more like
than does the string quartet and its accompanying
Rondo in C minor
that
wrote as an alternate finale at his teacher's behest. The album is filled out with a
String Quartet in E flat major
by
's own student,
Friedrich Klose
, who was, like his teacher, symphonically minded and wrote only this piece of chamber music. It is a fluent work, but
Klose
himself described it well as "a tribute paid in four installments to my stern German schoolmasters." The
contributes unimpeachable performances to an album that will certainly be of interest to close observers of the
scene; a
world premiere isn't something that comes along every day. ~ James Manheim