Luogo e data di registrazione		Musica Théâtre Salle de Musique, La Chaux-de-Fonds (Svizzera) - 5-28 gennaio 1976
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer / Engineer		Vittorio Negri | Tony Buczynski
	Edizione LP		Philips | 6503 068 | 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.

The chamber music is composed by Schubert between 1810 and 1814 were very closely associated with domestic music-making, being written for the family quartet formed by the composer with his father and his two brothers Ignaz and Ferdinand, like the early symphonies, they reveal the extent to which Schubert appropriated the musical language of the Viennese Classic school, for direct borrowings from Mozart and Beethoven are not uncommon. The E flat major Quartet, D. 87 also sounds alternately like Gaydn and Mozart, although it cannot really stand up to such comparisons. The great expert on Mozart and the Romantics, Alfred Einstein, observed, "It is Mozartian from beginning to end, only lacking the watchful or wakeful quality of Mozart's invention." It is schematic and regular in its formal and thematic structure, and the imitation of Classical features is over-careful, so that its Classicism almost seems affected. This quartet, long thought to have been written in 1824 owing to a wrong reading of a passage in a letter, was neither printed nor publicly performed during Schubert's lifetime: it appeared in 1830 as Op. 125 No. 1. The Andante of the String Quartet in A minor D. 804 is derived from one of the entr'actes for "Rosamunde, Princess of Cyprus," a play by Helmina von Chézy, the poetess whose ineffable librettos had already spelt doom for Weber and his "Euryanthe." "Rosamunde," performed in Vienna in December 1823, fell victim to devastating criticism, and so it is quite understandable that in order to rescue the enchanting melody from the entr'acte Schubert transferred it to the quartet written shortly afterwards. "I have been trying my hand," writes Schubert in a letter to his friend Leopold Kupelwieser, the painter, "at several instrumental pieces, for I have composed two quartets... and an octet, and I want to write another quartet, for my overriding intention is to prepare my path in this way for a great symphony." The "great symphony" was simply the standard work which the ambitious composer had to tackle and which could bring him public recognition. And Schubert had not, in fact, written a "great symphony" by 1824, for he could not count either his early works in this form or the "Unfinished" B minor Symphony. For modern ears, however, it is actually the two string quartets of 1824 in A minor and D minor, which are amongst Schubert's most personal instrumental compositions, more so perhaps than the "Great C major" Symphony. The a minor String Quartet was performed in March 1824 at a concert given by the Society of Friends of Music, with Ignaz Schuppanzigh as leader - the only one of Schubert's quartets to attain the distinction of a complete public performances in his lifetime. The press notices were reserved. The Viennese "Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung" felt that one would need. "to hear [the composition] more often before giving a considered judgement" and the correspondent of the "Leipziger Blatt" observed rather patronisingly: "Quartet No. 1 by Schubert, not too had for a first effort." (Nothing was generally known of the existence of earlier quartets by Schubert.) His friend Moritz von Schwind, however, hit upon a description still valid today when he wrote: "The quartet by Schubert was performed, rather slowly in his opinion, but with great purity and tenderness. As a whole it is very gentle but it has a way of making a melody stay with one, as in a song, full of feeling and very distinctive.". Peter Steiner

Illustration: Johann Georg Valentin Ruths (1825-1905) "Wiese und Wald", 1895 (Kunsthalle, Hamburg)