SCHUBERT: String Quartets (Complete), Vol. 7

SCHUBERT String Quartets: No. 5 in B?; in c, “Quartettsatz.” String Trio in B?, D 471 . 5 Minuets, D 89 . Overture in c, D 8 (ed. Hess) 1 • Kodály Qrt; Gyözö Máthé (va) 1 • NAXOS 8.557126 (55:48) This disc, volume seven in the Kodály’s cycle of the Schubert quartets, should prove a revelation to anyone unfamiliar with the composer’s early works, everything here produced while he was still in his teens. Maybe he was not quite the prodigy that Mendelssohn was at the same age. Nonetheless, the youthful Schubert possessed an imagination and daring that remain astonishing for an adolescent and—even more than in his first four symphonies (also teenage productions)—suggest the influence of Beethoven. The earliest score, the C-Minor Overture in the Hess arrangement for string quintet, was written in 1811. The latest (and probably most familiar) in the group, the one-movement Trio, dates from 1816, when Schubert was 19. Along with the Minuets and unlike the other works in thi