String Quartet No. 3, etc.

Classical albums often have unimaginative and unwieldy titles merely listing the pieces they contain. This one labours under the title String Quartet No. 3, Two Pieces For String Octet, Piano Quintet, these all being compositions by Dmitri Shostakvich, performed here by the Borodin Quartet, who are joined by the Prokofiev Quartet for the 'Two Pieces' and by pianist Sviatoslav Richter for the Quintet. I had heard this version of the Quintet via a download some time ago, and had subsequently bought a different performance of it on CD which hadn't quite hit the spot in the same way, hence my eventually buying this disc.

I'd been slightly reluctant to acquire it as I already owned a performace of the String Quartet No. 3 by The Borodin Quartet, and, shelf-space being limited, I prefer not to have duplicates. On the other hand, the perfomance I already had was recorded in the '60s by the Quartet's original line-up, whereas this one dates from 1983, by which time Mikhail Kopelman had replaced Rosislav Dubinsky as first violinist and Andrei Abramenkov had taken over from Yarolsav Alexandrov as the second. As it happens, the original line-up also feature on this disc in the 'Two Pieces for String Octet'.

It didn't work out badly as I'd not really given Quartet No. 3 a proper hearing before, typically favouring Nos. 4, 8 and 10 when listening that the other, earlier recording. Having it on this CD has enhanced my appreciation of it considerably. Meanwhile I love this performance of the Quintet as much as ever. It's a riveting live recording made in the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire in December '83.

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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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