String Quartet No. 2

Hans Georg Bertram says of his Second String Quartet: 'The four movements of my Second String Quartet were written in a sense of musical-compositional transformation. In the first movement, an atmospherically dense vocal structure is woven over a tonal ostinato. The theme of the second movement, formed of four major thirds, develops in six contrasting variations. In the third movement, a contrapuntally strict structure gives rise to the most intimate song. The fourth movement is a joyfully moving 'perpetuum mobile' that surprisingly fades away in a ppp.