ARRIAGA: String Quartets (Complete)
Camerata Boccherini
8.557628

Each Friday we select a track from a Naxos Music Group album released twenty years ago to provide the accompaniment for five minutes of your downtime.

This week’s pick from the Naxos label is a string quartet by Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga, a precociously talented composer as well as an excellent violinist, who was known as ‘The Spanish Mozart’ after his premature death in 1826 at the age of 19. With a style somewhere between Mozart and the early romanticism of Beethoven or Schubert, his three String Quartets, published in Paris in 1824, demonstrate Arriaga’s genius for winning melodies, emotional pathos and innovative structure. Here’s the last movement of his String Quartet No. 2 in A major.