Bruch: String Quintets & Octet
WDR Sinfonieorchester Chamber Players
Awards:
-
Presto Editor's Choice, June 2021
The WDR Symphony Orchestra’s Chamber Players find the heart in this music, and I find their readings very moving. Add to that a beautiful recording from Alpha, and you have a winner.
Bruch: String Quintets & Octet
WDR Sinfonieorchester Chamber Players
Purchase product
Awards:
-
Presto Editor's Choice, June 2021
The WDR Symphony Orchestra’s Chamber Players find the heart in this music, and I find their readings very moving. Add to that a beautiful recording from Alpha, and you have a winner.
About
Max Bruch was eighty years old when, in 1918, he decided to return to the chamber music genre he had frequented in his early years. Stimulated by the violin virtuoso Willy Hess, he composed two string quintets and an octet, monuments to beauty and harmony, at the end of a tumultuous personal life and in the midst of a western world on the brink of collapse. After an album devoted to Beethoven’s chamber music, the Chamber Players of the WDR Sinfonieorchester now tackle one of the last chapters of German Romantic music, with pieces that constitute Bruch’s swansong.
Contents and tracklist
- WDR Sinfonieorchester Chamber Players
- WDR Sinfonieorchester Chamber Players
- WDR Sinfonieorchester Chamber Players
Awards and reviews
-
Presto Editor's ChoiceJune 2021
March/April 2022
The WDR Symphony Orchestra’s Chamber Players find the heart in this music, and I find their readings very moving. Add to that a beautiful recording from Alpha, and you have a winner.
October 2021
The WDR players are adept at reconciling Bruch’s often contrasting stylistic demands, as Mendelssohn-like brilliance evaporates into deep Brahmsian Innigkeit.
June 2021
Bruch may have been over eighty when he composed his Octet for Strings, but much of the piece bubbles with an amiable energy that bears comparison with the teenage Mendelssohn’s much better-known work in the genre from almost a century earlier. The Cologne musicians do it (and the two quintets dating from around the same time) proud, with leader Ye Wu revelling in the ebullient writing for the work’s dedicatee Willy Hess.
