Quatuor Diotima's New CD: "Bruckner & Klose String Quartets"

Released on Pentatone, the album celebrates the bicentennial anniversary of Anton Bruckner and a world premiere recording from his pupil Friedrich Klose

Released on Pentatone Records, Quatuor Diotima's newest album presents Anton Bruckner's String Quartet in C Minor, Rondo in C Minor, and Theme with Variations in E-Flat Major, alongside Friedrich Klose's String Quartet in E-Flat Major.

This album, recorded at and in close cooperation with the Brucknerhaus Linz, celebrates Anton Bruckner's bicentennial anniversary. Bruckner wrote the featured pieces as composition exercises, yet they outline the originality and power of his later works and pay tribute to the Viennese quartet tradition.

"The writing of this quartet is quite unique as well: it seems very simple at first, very organized formally between the voices, but under this clarity of discourse lies a real orchestral imagination!" the Quatuor Diotima told The Violin Channel.

Klose, a pupil of Bruckner sarcastically subtitled his string quartet a “tribute paid in four installments to my stern German schoolmasters.”

"Klose brings together the poetic and more specifically sarcastic imagery and virtuosity of Liszt, the dramatic and motivic impact of Wagner and the broad harmonic and structural language of Bruckner," the Quatuor Diotima told us. "But the biggest influence of Klose is Bruckner’s: you find in his quartet powerful unisons such as the ones you might find in his teacher’s eighth or third symphonies, powerful thematic returns and climaxes such as the motif of the second movement coming back triumphantly at the very end," they added.

You can learn more about the release in this interview with the Quatuor Diotima. To purchase and listen to the full album, click here.

Listen to Bruckner's String Quartet in C Minor, WAB 111 below:

The Quatuor Diotima is one of the most in-demand chamber ensembles in the world today. They were formed in 1996 by graduates of the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris. The quartet’s name evokes a double musical significance: Diotima is at once an allegory of German romanticism – Friederich Hölderlin gives the name to the love of his life in his novel Hyperion – and a rallying cry for the music of our time, brandished by Luigi Nono in his composition Fragmente-Stille, a Diotima. The quartet has worked in close collaboration with several of the greatest composers of the late twentieth century, notably Pierre Boulez and Helmut Lachenmann. The quartet regularly commissions new works from composers of our time, including Toshio Hosokawa, Miroslav Srnka, Alberto Posadas, Mauro Lanza, Gérard Pesson, Rebecca Saunders, and Tristan Murail.

The Diotima Quartet was the first quartet in residence at Radio France from 2019 to 2021. The Diotima Quartet has found a new home in the Grand Est region, sharing strong cultural links with Germany and Switzerland, which resonate with the quartet’s repertoire and partners in Europe. This residency allows the quartet to develop its Academy in partnership with the Cité Musicale-Metz inviting young composers and string quartets from all over the world, a chamber music series in Strasbourg as well as an educational residency at the Ecole Nationale de Lutherie in Mirecourt.