Luogo e data di registrazione		La Salle des Remparts, La Tour-de-Peilz (Svizzera) - 13-24 giugno 1970
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer / Engineer		Vittorio Negri | Tony Buczynski
	Edizione LP		Philips | 6570 925 | 1 LP
	Prima Edizione CD		Vedi link alla prima edizione in long playing.
	Note		La collana "Musica da Camera" della Philips riedita negli anni '80 alcune registrazioni del Quartetto Italiano.

In Anton Webern's most mature music, the new resource of 12-note technique and the centuries-old device of canon come together in a musical language of unsurpassed concentration. That this synthesis was not achieved at once could be seen from the foreign stylistic elements in the earlier works published during Webern's lifetime. But in the 1960's, the long process of purification that had predated even Opus 1 became still more evident with the discovery of a collection of unpublished manuscripts, which doubled the available corpus of Webern's music. The Slow Movement and the String Quartet contained on the first side of this record both date from 1905 (three years before Op. 1), and they are a very different kind of Webern from the exquisitely polished brevity and concentration of the later music. The Slow Movement is the more traditional in style and layout. Its idiom is strongly tonal, moving from C minor to the relative major key, E flat. Already the fondness for the device of inversion prefigures his coming preoccupation with contrapuntal methods of organisation. The String Quartet (1905) is headed by a quotation from Jacobus Boehme (1575-1624) which may be translated: "The sense of triumph that prevailed within my spirit I cannot write nor tell, it can be compared with nothing but the birth of life in the midst of death - the resurrection of the dead. In this light did my mind immediately see through all things, and in all living creatures, even in weeds and grass, did recognise God, who He may be and how He may be and what His will is." The sens of these words is reflected in the mysterious character of the opening measures, which eimmediately present the basic three-note motif from which the whole work grows to its E major conclusion. The music is continuous, but it is built out of many short sections, including at one point a slow fugue lasting only 22 bars. The Five Movements, Op. 5, composed in 1909, show this tendency towards cellular construction in a more advanced phase. Here each motif is developed as soon as it is stated. Tonality is left behind, and the organising factor is the complex application of contrapuntal devices. The brevity to which such methods naturally tend reaches its ectreme manifestation in the Six Bagatelles, Op. 9 of 1913, whose total duration is less than five minutes. "Consider what moderation is required to express onself so briefly," said Schoenberg in a preface to the score: "You cam stretch every glance out into a poem, every sigh into a novel. But to express a novel in a single gesture, a joy in a breath - such concentration can only be present in  proportion to the absence of self-pity." In the String Quartet, Op. 28, dedicated to Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, the purification of means is completed. Emphasis on colour is replaced by concentration on line. Where the earlier works frequently indulge in special instrumental effects, in Op. 28 normal "arco" and normal "pizzicato" are the two playing modes, diversified only by use of mytes and by a single bar on the bridge in the second violin part. Written in 1938 - 14 years after Webern had fist adopted the 12-note technique - the quartet exemplifies his own mature version od dodecaphonic method at its most rigorous and economical. Bernard Jacobson

Illustration: Franz Marc (1880-1916) "Pferde" (Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg)