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A three-year run-up to the Silver Jubilee
 As a precursor to the 2001 Jubilee the quartet decided
to launch a number of major projects. One of these was the complete string chamber
music of the Second Viennese School performed over a period of two years. In the
1998/99 season the quartet put on a series of four programmes played in turn in
Amsterdam, The Hague and Utrecht. Frits van der Waa, writing in de Volkskrant
on February 27 1999, declared, 'the Schoenberg Quartet rightfully claim themselves
to be interpreters in the sense that they succeed in making this unruly oeuvre
comprehensible to ordinary mortals.' On the very same day Ernst Vermeulen wrote
effusively in the NRC of the 'ardent and utterly idiomatic interpretations whereby
every detail of the music was thoroughly assimilated and absorbed.' The following
season another series of four concerts followed, given once again in Amsterdam,
The Hague and Utrecht, with works by Berg, Webern and Zemlinsky. The project also
served as excellent preparation for the final round of recording sessions of the
complete string chamber music of the Second Viennese School. The season prior
to the jubilee was to be used for plugging a number of gaps in the Schoenberg
Quartet's repertoire. They had studied the Debussy String Quartet for the very
first time in 1997 and it only seemed natural to tackle the Ravel Quartet as well.
On April 1 2001 the Schoenberg Quartet gave their first performance of this masterpiece.
Another lacuna was the string quartets of Bartók. A Bartók cycle
was programmed for the 2000/01 season, dividing the composer's six quartets between
the Schoenberg Quartet and the Mondriaan Quartet.
In 1998, shortly prior to the three-year period in question, the Schoenberg
Quartet underwent a radical transformation. At the first rehearsal for the Schoenberg
cycle given in the summer of 1998, Henk Guittart experimented with the placing
of the musicians by the simple device of switching the positioning of the music
stands. During the first ten years of their existence the quartet had performed
in the 'score positioning' conventional among European ensembles, namely first
violin, second violin, viola, cello. During the 1986 Orlando Festival Walter Levin
of the LaSalle Quartet, who was giving a masterclass in Kerkrade, advised the
quartet to place the cello in the middle of the group in order to realise a better
sound. The Schoenberg Quartet immediately adopted his suggestion, the quartet
thereafter positioning itself in the order first violin, second violin, cello,
viola. In 1994 Viola de Hoog queried this arrangement and for several years the
quartet reverted to its previous practice. After the successful experiment of
1998 the quartet started performing in the classic Viennese grouping, namely first
violin, cello, viola, second violin. Photographs of nineteenth-century string
quartets show that most of them performed thus. Composers from Haydn to Bartók
had had this positioning in mind. In this way exchanges between the two violins
- question and answer - sound more spacious and logical. Strange to say little
comment was made about this alteration.
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