Schubert: String Quartets No. 14 "Death and the Maiden" & No. 13 "Rosamunde"

By 1824 Schubert was already suffering from the illness which killed him four years later, aged just 31. Anxiety over his predicament spilled out into the String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, named “Death and the Maiden” after the Schubert song which provided the melody for the slow movement. The Takács Quartet vividly catch the existential anxiety of the work’s dramatic opening movement, and bring an incisive technical control to the frenetic scurryings of the hell-for-leather finale. The melancholy of the String Quartet No. 13 in A minor is of a gentler, if no less vulnerable nature. The Takács players differentiate it carefully from the more expressionistic D minor quartet, drawing out a tender poetry from the slow movement before nurturing a graceful strain of optimism in the elegantly played finale.