Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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...

All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...

Ein Schattenspiel, etc.

Georg Friedrich Haas is a contemporary Austrian composer of "art music". "Haas's style recalls that of György Ligeti in its use of micropolyphony, microintervals and the exploitation of the overtone series; he is often characterized as a leading exponent of spectral music" says wikipedia. Only a relative few of his many compositions have been issued on CD - many more of them can be found on YouTube. On this 2020 disc are three of his works in which standard classical instrumentation is augmented and altered by "live electronics". Two are string quartets and one is for solo piano. Is a string quartet still really a quartet if there are meanwhile some other people with laptops busily twizzling the sound? There is a live performance video of the 'String Quartet No. 7', the first work on the disc, where the JACK Quartet are supplemented by a trio of sound boffins to realise the composition. Whether it's properly a quartet or a septet is neithe...