Schubert and Wolf from the Koeckert Quartet

The Koeckert Quartet was one of the leading chamber music ensembles of the postwar years, but not all of its recordings are easily available, nor is there much information on them presented in English.

This post, the results of a request on another forum, provides one work that is not otherwise in print, and another that has not been commercially available for many years. Both are exceptional performances.

The Koeckert Quartet

Some information on the quartet: the group dates back to 1939, but it only began performing under the Koeckert name in 1947, when its members were in the Bamberg Symphony. Two years later they moved to Munich and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. The members at that time (and for many years to come) were: Rudolf Koeckert, first violin, Willi Buchner, second violin, Oskar Riedl, viola, and Josef Merz, cello. Koeckert would lead the group until 1982, when his son, Rudolf-Joachim, took over the leadership under the name of the Joachim-Koeckert Quartet. That second iteration continued until 1992. Rudolf Koeckert died in 2005.

The brief program on this disc includes the glorious Schubert Quartettsatz (Quartet Movement) in C minor, D 703, the first movement of a quartet from Schubert's early maturity that he did not complete. The performance has not been reissued, to my knowledge. Its disk mate is Hugo Wolf's delightful and droll Italian Serenade, here in a knowing performance that also is not commercially available.

The recordings, which date from February 1951, come from the Beethovensaal in Hannover, the home city of Deutsche Grammophon, which originally issued the performances. My transfer is from a 10-inch US pressing in Decca's budget 4000 series. The sound is quite good.

I had trouble locating a photo of the original Koeckert Quartet; I scanned the one above from a small image in a 1956 DG catalogue.