The Klingler Quartet was regarded as the best string quartet of its times and as the rightful heir to the legendary Joachim Quartet. Karl Klingler (1879-1971), the musician who gave his name to the quartet, had studied with Brahms’s friend Joseph Joachim and had joined his teacher’s quartet as a young violist.

MDG’s sleuths have now found two remarkable historical documents in the archives of the Bavarian Radio that show us Klingler as a composer and as an interpreter: his Violin Concerto with Ulf Hoelscher and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under Volker Schmidt-Gertenbach and the Viola Sonata performed by the composer himself along with Michael Raucheisen at the piano. Klingler himself premiered his Violin Concerto with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1907.

Already at the age of twenty-two he had joined the orchestra as its concertmaster under the legendary Arthur Nikisch. Prior to this time he had learned the craft of composition from Max Bruch and Robert Kahn, and a short time later he was appointed to the faculty of the Berlin College of Music.

For fifty years Ulf Hoelscher and Volker Schmidt-Gertenbach have performed together and presented seventy works in more than three hundred concerts. This recording of Klingler’s Violin Concerto was produced about halfway along their common path and is a document of what even then was a profound shared understanding of music.