ELLALINE HOLMES (soprano)
THE CHARLES WOODHOUSE QUARTET:
Charles Woodhouse (violin); Walter Price (violin); Ernest Tomlinson (viola); Edward Robinson (violoncello)
This is one of the famous early set of string quartets, six in number, in which the youthful Beethoven gave at the age of thirty such emphatic and unmistakable assurance to the musical world of his intention to surpass all that had previously been accomplished in works of this class. Although they are all in the style of the composer's first period, reflecting the influence of his models, Haydn and Mozart, it is possible to point in each one to passages, not to say whole movements, which neither of those great masters could conceivably have written, and which proclaim the opening of a new chapter in the history cf the string quartet.