Schubert's String Quartet No. 15 in Building a Library with Jeremy Sams and Andrew McGregor

Andrew McGregor with the best of the week's new classical releases.

c2.10pm
The music writer, novelist, and opera librettist Jessica Duchen joins Andrew to review the latest new releases that have caught her ear.

3pm
Building a Library. Jeremy Sams surveys recordings of Schubert's String Quartet No. 15 in G major, D. 887 and makes a top recommendation.

Published posthumously in 1851, Schubert's String Quartet No. 15 - his final work in the genre - was staggering in scale. In duration it eclipsed all preceding quartets, including Beethoven's ambitious String Quartet in B flat, Op. 130, which some argue whet the composer's creative appetite to stretch conventional architecture of the form further still. Others question whether its vastness belies claims that it was penned in only ten days in June 1826 and may have gestated instead out of a grand symphonic project he'd first contemplated in 1824. What is certain, however, is the skill with which the composer inventively deployed the full expressive possibilities of his musical language over the course of the work's four contrasting movements.

c3.50pm
Record of the Week. Andrew's top pick of this week's new releases.