Musique de Chambre

Here is a 3CD album of instrumental and chamber music by the Czech-born composer variously known as Antonín Rejcha, or Anton (or Antoine) Reicha. He was born in the same year as Beethoven, and was an on-and-off friend of Ludwig's: the pair played together in an orchestra in Bonn in their late teens, and were later re-acquainted in Vienna. Unlike his his much more famous contemporary, Reicha's genius did not extend to self-promotion, and he was oftentimes content to leave his compositions unpublished. Although he won renown as a teacher and theorist in his day, posterity mostly forgot about him.

The body of work he composed for wind quintet, however, retained a measure of popularity, and prevented his name from falling into complete obscurity. There has been a small-scale revival of interest in his other music over recent decades, with the current album providing an intriguing selection of it. I love half of its contents and feel lukewarm about the remainder. The solo piano pieces on Disc 2 don't do all that much for me, and neither does the String Quartet in E major on Disc 1: a disappointment, as certain other of his earlier quartets (dating back to his time in Vienna, & not included here) are wonderful.

The String Quintet in F major on Disc 1, on the other hand, is my favourite thing on the album. Although published in the 1820s, it was written ca. 1807, not long after those earlier quartets: personally I like it every bit as much as Beethoven's music of that same period. Also from ca. 1807 is the wonderful and unusal Trio for 3 cellos which closes disc 3. Lastly, as if to prove he didn't just lose his edge with age, the other piece on the same disc, an 1824 Piano Trio in D minor, is also highly enjoyable, if less unconventional.

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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...

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 ...

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