George Perle: The String Quartets, Vol. 1 (2013)

George Perle's international fame as the author of Serial Composition and Atonality (1962) and his reputation as a theorist overshadowed his true life's work as a composer, so an appraisal of his music has been long in coming. This album of his String Quartets No. 2, No. 5, and No. 8, as well as the single-movement Molto adagio, presents the key aspects of Perle as a composer of both tonal and serial works. The String Quartet in D minor is as straightforward a tonal piece as he could compose within his highly chromatic ... Read More

George Perle's international fame as the author of Serial Composition and Atonality (1962) and his reputation as a theorist overshadowed his true life's work as a composer, so an appraisal of his music has been long in coming. This album of his String Quartets No. 2, No. 5, and No. 8, as well as the single-movement Molto adagio, presents the key aspects of Perle as a composer of both tonal and serial works. The String Quartet in D minor is as straightforward a tonal piece as he could compose within his highly chromatic style, though if there is more than a resemblance to Béla Bartók's String Quartet No. 2, the similarities are enlightening (they are also quite pronounced in the Molto adagio). The String Quartet No. 5 is considerably more developed as a twelve-tone piece, following the rules laid down by Arnold Schoenberg, though Windows of Order (String Quartet No. 8) is the fullest representation of Perle's ideas of a hybrid system of dodecaphonic and tonal concepts, detailed in his book,... Read Less