Beethoven: String Quartets Op. 59 No. 3, Op. 95 & Op. 133 – Chiaroscuro Quartet

The Chiaroscuro Quartet continues its thrilling journey through Beethoven’s string quartets with three works that chart the composer’s development in the genre. The ‘Razumovsky’ Quartets (1806), commissioned by Count Razumovsky for his house quartet led by Schuppanzigh, expanded the genre’s scale beyond Op. 18, baffling early listeners with their symphonic ambition. The first two were released last March (BIS-2688). The third and final quartet of the set, Op. 59 No. 3 in C major, which opens this recording, is the most accessible, with a Mozart-indebted introduction, a Slavonic-sounding Andante, and a flamboyant fugal finale. The F minor Quartet, Op. 95 (‘Quartetto serioso’, 1810), written amid personal turmoil, is starker and more radical – compressed, harmonically abrupt, and structurally fragmented, ending unexpectedly in a light F major coda. Finally, the Grosse Fuge (1826), originally the finale of Op. 130, represents Beethoven’s most uncompromising achievement: a vast, dissonant fusion of fugue and variation that baffled contemporaries but was later hailed by Stravinsky as timeless and revolutionary. Together these works chart Beethoven’s progression from conversational classicism to visionary modernism.