Luogo e data di registrazione		Het Wapen Van Eindhoven, Eindhoven (Olanda) - 17-22 febbraio 1968
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer / Engineer		Vittorio Negri | Willem van Leeuwen
	Edizione LP		Philips | 6503 109 | 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 many ways Dvořák's "American" Quartet is the chamber music equivalent of his "New World" Symphony. Both were written in 1893; both are his most popular works in their respective fields; and both have nicknames which have proved dangerously misleading. The titles mean little more than "composed in America" although people have persisted in believing that the works are full of American folk-melodies. As director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York. Dvořák stayed in America for three years in all. He did not, however, find the bustle of the city very conducive to composition and, when he heard of a Czech village settlement at Spillville in Iowa he lost no time in arranging to spend his summer vacations there. In this peaceful atmosphere he began the F major String Quartet on June 8, 1893 and by June 23 it was complete. The first movement is in sonata form, although Dvořák gives us two themes in his second subject group. The melodies are mainly pentatonic, lending them a distinct folk-like air. Nostalgia is apparent in the lyrical yet intense slow movement in D minor, which is followed by a scherzo in F built around one theme. The simple elements of this are derived from the song of a bird the composer saw in Spillville. (He described it as a red bird with only the wings black - probably a scarlet tanager, a summer visitor to Iowa, like a Dvořák.) The finale is a rondo with a central episode in which Otakar Sourek hears a reminiscence of the little Spillville church where Dvořák played the organ daily. Borodin's, like that of Dvořák, presents national feeling within a classical framework. As a result his two string quartets have taken their place as both great Russian and great European works. The second quartet, the more popular of the two, was begun in August 1881, and Borodin's biographer, Serge Dianin, claims it was completed by the end of the month to mark the twentieth anniversary of Borodin's engagement. The work is, in fact, dedicated to the composer's wife who, by all accounts, was sentimental about such remembrances, and this may account for the work's heavily romantic flavour. Dianin goes farther and tentatively suggest (without any real evidence) a programme in which the movements recall periods of courtship and marriage. There are three themes in the lyrical first movement. The second, built around a fragment of the first appears in F sharp minor. The third, subsidiary theme assumes a martial air before giving way again to the second subject. There is no trio with the scherzo which follows: instead we have two themes - a bustling first subject and a waltz-like duet on the violins ("Baubles, Bangles, and Beads" in the musical "Kismet"). The Notturno has been made popular in several adaptations, notably "And this is my beloved" in "Kismet." None, however, has matched the beauty of the original. Again there are two subjects. The finale opens with two "question and answer" figures which inevitably recall the "Muss es sein? Es muss sein!" of Beethoven's Op. 135. These figures are ingeniously combined in the Vivace as they lead to the chromatic second subject. A. David Hogarth

Illustration: Karl Haider (1846-1912) "Leutstettener Vorfrühlingslandeschaft" (Kunsthalle, Mannheim)