String Quartets Op 76

Only within the last five years have I begun to appreciate the delights of Haydn's music, and even now I know very little of it beyond his later string quartets. It had formerly struck me as ungraspably remote music, but after acquiring, and properly listening to, a couple of '60s quartet recordings on vinyl, its finer qualities belatedly started to sink in. With a few quartets obtained piecemeal in that way from nearby charity shops, I thought it would be good to get a larger set of them on CD, and, to that end, bought the Op 71, 74 & 76 quartets in early '90s performances by the Kodály Quartet on four discs for a few pounds via ebay.

I was perfectly happy with those excellent recordings except, with each disc being in its own separate jewel case, they took up what I felt was a disproportionate expanse of my limited shelf-space. When I read the praise of the recent recordings by the London Haydn Quartet on the Hyperion label, with the same pieces available as two double CD sets, I ordered those to serve as more compact replacements, and donated the old Naxos discs to the local charity shop for someone else to enjoy.

These performances are also excellent, albeit, perhaps owing to their being played on period instruments, they seem airier; less immediate. The double-CD jewel cases, alas, are the fragile kind that break very readily, as mine have already done. I'm not yet fully convinced that 'upgrading' from the older recordings was worth the while, but I've also yet to enough much time with these newer ones to be quite sure, and it could be that further familiarisation (and perhaps some sturdier cases) will win me over.

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Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4. An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...

Onslow

George Onslow was an odd-man-out among 19th-century French composers. Born into wealth and privilege, the grandson of an English Earl, he had no need to follow the operatic gravy train, with string quartets (of which he wrote 36) and string quintets (there are another 32 of those) forming the bulk of his compositional output. The present disc contains his 28th, 29th and 30th quartets, in compelling performances by the Quatuor Diotima. These quartets were written toward the end of a prolifically-creative period for Onslow in the years 1829-35. Viviane Niaux, in her informative booklet notes, ascribes this to the composer's having heard performances of two of Beethoven's late quartets for the first time in 1828, at their Paris première. Like many of his contemporaries, Onslow was at once "fascinated and disconcerted", and, although he considered them "extravagant", they seem to have been powerfully inspirational. A further spur to creativity may have been his ...

Influencías

In my original blogging days, I would occasionally run giveaways to offload unwanted books or CDs to whomever claimed them. Sometimes the recipients would offer to send me something in return. It was in this way that, ca. 2007, a Catalan correspondent sent me Influencías: a CD of perfomances by the Barcelona-based Cuarteto Casals. The CD begins with Maurice Ravel's renowned string quartet: I hadn't known the piece before receiving this disc, but I was sold on it by this fresh & bright performance. Next is a quartet called 'Vistes al Mar' by the Catalan composer Eduardo Toldrá. Its evocative maritime movements are prefaced by recitations of poems by Joan Maragall, a Catalan author whose works directly inspired the piece. Lastly there's an arrangement of Joaquín Turina's atmospheric 'Oración del Torero', originally composed for a lute quartet. I'm on the fence about the cover photo: it's a well-composed picture & not a bad idea, but with 2...

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