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TRACK LISTING Ludwig Thuille (1861 –1907) QUARTET NO.1 IN A MAJOR 1 Allegro moderato 8’54 2 Adagio molto 5’57 3 Scherzo – vivo 3’38 4 Finale – Quasi Presto 6’56 5 QUARTETT-SATZ 11’46 a g QUARTET NO.2 IN G MAJOR e v o l 6 Allegro 11’58 a E 7 Menuetto Allegretto 5’06 n e B 8 Andante 7’26 y b h p a r g o t o h Total playing time: 61’44 P Produced by Richard Sutcliffe Engineered by Alexander Van Ingen Edited & Mastered by Matthew Bennett Recorded on 14th–16th May 2012 in the Music Room, Champs Hill, West Sussex, UK Cover and rear photos by David Fisher Executive Producer for Champs Hill Records: Alexander Van Ingen Label Manager for Champs Hill Records: John Dickinson FOREWORD My acquaintance with Ludwig Thuille started back in 1995. I was visiting my family It wasn’t long after that Raffy Todes and I invited Tomer over for a series of in Israel when I received a phone call from one of my oldest friends, and long-time performances in the UK; the quintet (no.2) was a huge success, and we immediately chamber music partner, pianist Tomer Lev. He was very excited about an old score he started exploring the possibility of recording it. A little while later, The Falk Quartet had discovered, and as is the case with such things, the finding of the score came and Tomer recorded both the Thuille quintets at Champs Hill (now available as with a story. CHRCD002). An elderly lady from South America who emigrated to Israel sold her grand piano to Since then Thuille’s music has been enjoying a healthy revival, with more of his my friend. As an afterthought, she decided to gift him with a beautiful antique music being both published and recorded. piano stool that had a storage compartment under the seat. Inside, my friend A few years after recording the quintets, I managed to come by a manuscript of a discovered, amongst other gems, a score from 1907. It was brown with age and had previously unpublished quartett-satz (quartet movement) which we have included a tendency to disintegrate when handled with anything less than extreme care. here with his String Quartets. A cursory look at the music was enough to rouse my friend’s curiosity and, knowing The other two pieces on this CD, the quartets in G and A, are both sunny and that I was in town, he called me. melodious works. We met a few hours later and were joined by cellist Hillel Tzory and Tomer’s wife In spite of being very early compositions, they nevertheless show Thuille’s musical and violist, Lilach Levanon. We started by playing parts of each movement. It is genius and are a worthy addition to the mainstream chamber music repertoire. difficult to describe the excitement that possessed us when we realised the magnitude of the discovery. Here was a true masterpiece. A creation by a previously unknown (at least to us) yet masterful composer at the height of his prowess. The style was late romantic. The structure was of the grandest of scales, yet traditional and flawlessly constructed. The harmonic language had elements of Brahms, Bruckner and Wagner, but to our ears it most resembled the music (early to mid period) of Richard Strauss. Ofer Falk PROGRAMME NOTES Though a German, in fact a Bavarian, composer Ludwig Wilhelm Andreas Maria became the teacher of Ernest Bloch, Walter Braunfels, Henry Hadley, Hermann Thuille was born in Bolzano (Bozen) in Southern Tyrol. At the age of six, following Abendroth and Paul von Klenau, among others. the death of his mother, he entered the Benedictine Monastery of Kremsmünster in At the dawn of the 20th century Thuille was certainly considered a significant Upper Austria, which had a strong musical tradition: here he sang as a choirboy figure, mainly on the strength of his six operas; after his early death, from a and received a basic musical as well as general education. In 1876, by which time heart attack, in 1907 he continued to be respected as a theorist, on account of he had also lost his father, Thuille was invited to stay in Innsbruck with Pauline his widely-used Harmonielehre written in collaboration with Rudolf Louis and Nagiller, widow of the composer Matthäus Nagiller. In Innsbruck he continued his published in the year of Thuille’s death. However, virtually his only work to studies with Nagiller’s successor as conductor of the Innsbruck Musikverein, the survive in the general repertoire has been his genial Sextet for piano and wind, respected composer-pianist and pedagogue Josef Pembaur the Elder (1848-1923) , one of the few ornaments of a genre not over-endowed with programming who had studied with Bruckner. (Later, Thuille would be the teacher of Pembaur’s choices. In fact unlike many of his contemporaries Thuille continued to cultivate son, Josef II, who also became a composer.) the chamber-music genre, and in this sense is more comparable to such It was in Innsbruck in 1877 that Thuille first met Richard Strauss, three years his composers as Reger and Pfitzner than to Strauss. Orphaned while still very young, junior (the Nagillers and the Strausses were acquaintances). This was the stylistically Thuille remained more conservative than Strauss, and more concerned beginning of a lifelong friendship. In 1879 Thuille moved to Strauss’s home city of to maintain classical forms, though his music frequently carries a full burden of Munich, where they both attended the Akademie der Tonkunst as students; Thuille late-Romantic emotion. In addition to the sextet, his output includes two piano studied composition with the celebrated Josef Rheinberger and completed his quintets, a superb cello sonata, an early symphony and the piano concerto: but degree in 1882 with the highest marks (and a public performance of his Piano he put most of his mature creative energies into his operas, and the bulk of the Concerto). It was also in 1882 that he first met Alexander Ritter, the ardent orchestral and instrumental works date from his teens or early twenties. proselytiser for the music of Wagner, who was also a friend of Strauss; Thuille So it is with Thuille’s music for string quartet. The quartets in A major and G would later acknowledge that Ritter was responsible for turning his attention major are essentially student works, though very accomplished ones of strongly towards opera and music-drama. In 1885 Thuille and Ritter both followed Strauss and amiably melodic character. Indeed the String Quartet in A major was written to Meiningen, where he had achieved the conductorship of the court orchestra in at the age of 16 while Thuille was still living in Innsbruck, before he had even succession to Hans von Bülow; and after a succession of teaching posts, Thuille started studying with Rheinberger. He dedicated it to his new friend Richard went on in 1890 to become professor of theory and composition at the Munich Strauss, who was also at this stage putting much of his energies into chamber Akademie der Tonkunst (in succession to Rheinberger). It was there that he music. In a letter of thanks, Strauss hailed it as ‘exquisite, rich in melody, very opening subject is substantially varied on its return. A final structural surprise is well set and brilliantly composed in beautiful form’. the very brief coda, which brings the movement to a peaceful close. Whether at this early date Thuille could have known the two recent Op.51 string The slow movement, a fairly short piece in A minor, starts off with a repeated quartets by Brahms is unclear, and perhaps unlikely. Certainly the A major Quartet theme of some pathos; it is rather like a miniaturized version of a Beethoven harks back to earlier models. Indeed the four-movement work is in its general Adagio melody. This is developed and decorated towards a contrasting central stance distinctly old-fashioned even for 1878: though not quite a pastiche, it’s a section in A major, more hymn-like and positive in feeling. The minor-key material work in which the example of Haydn, and perhaps some early Beethoven, is then returns, with further decoration. A cheerful scherzo in E major follows, with a predominant. Its phraseology and forms are approximately classical, the melodic hint of a country dance. There is a more pensive trio section in E minor before the interest tends to be concentrated in the first violin, and the harmonic language da capo of the scherzo . holds few surprises. It’s not without some individual character, and it’s certainly The finale, marked Quasi Presto , returns us to A major and is another sonata-form fluently-written and entirely agreeable to listen to. The general mellifluousness design. It begins with a forthright, optimistic theme and moves to a more lyrical recalls Schubert and Mendelssohn, and possibly conservative elder contemporaries second subject. In many ways this is the most inventive of the four movements, like Franz or Ignaz Lachner; but the result is that we hear a gifted but very both in variety of texture and rhythmic pointing, and in the technical demands young composer composing a string quartet according to the best classical made on the performers, with plenty of caprice and wit in the way the material is models. It’s notable that the young Thuille does not go out of his way to handled. The widely modulating development arrives at a recapitulation in which, compose elaborate transitions between sections, but tends to move directly from as in the first movement, the opening theme is quite varied, the stability of the one to the next; and the endings of his movements are laconic, without formal design being reasserted when the second subject, originally presented in E, returns codas or only very brief ones.

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