‘The Bohemians [were] the most musical among all the nations, indeed perhaps in
the whole of Europe’.
Charles Burney, 1773
Short after the most successful album “sound escapes” (Capriccio C5239) the
young and aspiring Signum Quartet take care of the Bohemian Music Culture.
Beside the famous String Quartet Op. 106 by Antonín Dvořák (‘I am very satisfied
with everything I have accomplished in this quartet.’) and the Meditation on the
Old Czech Chorale ‘St. Wenceslaus’, full of impressions of the beginning of the
1st World War, by Josef Suk, are finally the 1923 composed Five
Pieces for String Quartet by Erwin Schulhoff, which all experiment with dance
forms, a very virtuosity challenge. ‘Music is never philosophy’ (Erwin
Schulhoff). The succinct statement conceals what was capable of so lastingly
impressing Charles Burney already in his time: direct, if possible, spontaneous
expression in music.