This is a rummy disc in some slipway, even though the Petersen Quartet are a fine young supporting players and soprano Christine Sch�fer is a hugely experienced interpreter of the music of the Second Viennese school. Their performance together of Schoenberg's Second Quartet is a model of musicality, even if the voice is set a bit also far forth in the recorded balance and Sch�fer's delivery of the two settings of Stefan George texts verges on sprechgesang at times. The Petersens also make an first-class job of Webern's early string quartette movement, composed while he was a pupil of Schoenberg, and still peeling the trappings of recent romanticism.
But Alban Berg's contribution to this phonograph record is much more problematical. Die Geheime Gestimme is the title given here to the last movement of Berg's Lyric Suite, whose suppressed text, a setting of George's translation of Baudelaire's poem De Profundis Clamavi, was only discovered half a hundred after the composer's death. It is debatable whether the composer ever envisaged its being sung in a performance of the quartet, or whether its inclusion in one copy of the score was just some other strand in the web of allusions that branch through his works. Whatever the truth, it is hard to believe that he ever so imagined it would be sung as a self-contained piece, as it is here. Including just the final motion of the Lyric Suite makes even less sense when the running time of the disc is under 45 minutes, and the whole work, fifty-fifty the two alternative versions of the finale, could have easily been accommodated. The sleeve notes are shoddy and their English translation is poor - Berg's work becomes the "Lyrical Suit".
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