Howard Blake - Spieltrieb - World Premiere - Edinburgh Quartet

Opus594 - September 2008.
This world-premiere of ‘Spieltrieb’ took place at the Edinburgh Quartet’s 50th Anniversary Concert in The Queen’s Hall Edinburgh on 19th February 2010.
From the composer:
"My relationship with the Edinburgh Quartet goes back to 1960, the year it was formed, when as a piano student at the Royal Academy I gave a concert in the Leith Hall with violinist Miles Baster. As a result of this concert Miles was presented with the great opportunity of creating a brand-new string quartet and he devoted virtually his whole life to it, leaving behind a great legacy of performances and recordings. I was much honoured to be asked to compose a work to celebrate the 50th anniversary and thought a lot about what form it should take. Beethoven has been much associated with them and is often considered the weightiest of quartet creators, with the last quartets seeming to move away from sonata form into some sort of freer space where he seems to be playing with ideas more than working with them. I remembered the remark attributed to Mozart when accused of not taking music seriously enough: ‘The verb that qualifies music is to play’. Beethoven’s near-contemporary, Schiller, in fact developed a theory that there is within all of us an ‘urge to play’ and this urge if followed can take our minds and ideas to the highest possible level".
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