String Quartets: No. 1 in F Op. 18 No.
1 (1798-1800) [26.28];
No. 2 in G Op. 18 No. 2 (1798-1800)
[21.22]
No. 3 in D Op. 18 No. 3 (1798-1800)
[21.08]
No. 4 in c Op. 18 No. 4 (1798-1800)
[24.41]
No. 5 in A Op. 18 No. 5 (1798-1800)
[30.53]
No. 6 in B flat Op. 18 No. 6 (1798-1800)
[25.24]
No. 7 in F Rasumovsky Op. 59
No. 1 (1805-06) [38.16]
No. 8 in e Rasumovsky Op 59.
No. 2 (1805-06) [35.30]
No. 9 in C Rasumovsky Op. 59
No. 3 (1805-06) [32.58]
No. 10 in Eb
Harp Op. 74 (1809) [33.35]
No. 11 in f Serioso Op. 95 (1810)
[21.39]
No. 12 in Eb
Op. 127 (1823-24) [38.29]
No. 13 in Bb
Op. 130 (1825-26) [38.48]
No. 14 in c# Op. 131 (1826)
[39.28]
No. 15 in a Op. 132 (1825) [48.14]
Grosse Fuge in Bb
Op. 133 (1825-26) [16.45]
No. 16 in F Op. 135 (1826) [26.17];
Comparison Recordings
Vegh Quartet (1952) mono [ADD] Music
& Arts 7 CD 1084
Talich Quartet [middle quartets] mono
[ADD] Calliope 9636/7/8
Alban Berg Quartet Opp 130/1/2/3 EMI
72435 69793-2 & CDC 7 47136-2
Hollywood Quartet [late quartets + G.F.]
mono [ADD] Testament SBT 3082
Many times I have said
in my reviews how I’m sick of Beethoven
but it was always to be understood that
I never meant the quartets, of course.
I don’t listen to them often any more,
but when I listen I want to hear it
right, and the Guarneri are the ones
who get it right from the beginning
to the end — Early, Middle, and Late.
They make this music sound as important
as it is and treat it with the respect
it deserves, and make a damn good show
if it at the same time — finding grace,
charm, even humour.
When I first discovered
these recordings I played one for a
dear old lady friend of mine and she
protested: "Something’s wrong with
your set," she said. "The
volume keeps going up and down."
"Helen," I replied, "That’s
called drama." But of course
her old ears did not deceive her — these
are very strongly modelled performances,
in dynamics as well as in texture. These
are the ‘Leopold Stokowski’ performances
of the Beethoven Quartets. They
are classic in another sense as well,
for if you note my list of comparison
recordings above, this is almost the
only one in stereo. I take scant interest
in more recent, more popular, more fashionable
Beethoven quartet performances. Oh,
I’ve heard them, but they leave me uninvolved.
At least one of them moves me to noisy
ridicule, another to vocal profanity,
but I will be uncharacteristically polite
and not mention the names. What are
these dumb kids thinking? Some of them
are thinking that since these Quartets
are the genesis of Schoenberg’s atonal
style that they should be played as
though Schoenberg had written them.
Baaad mistake!
The Berg quartet play
with scholarly authority and impeccable
logic. These are wonderful things, and
I would not be without them, but perhaps
not for every day. Beethoven was a showman,
and whether or not his public appreciated
these quartets, he intended them to
be entertaining. Better than any of
the other groups, the Guarneri find
that theatricality here and express
it effectively. The Vegh quartet play
with an Eastern European, almost brutally
Slavic kind of intensity. Such an ethos
was present in Vienna when Beethoven
was there, and the music gains from
having it expressed. But, again, maybe
not for every day.
The whole of the Guarneri’s
Opus 18 is brilliant, not too distant
from Haydn but not too close, either.
After hearing these early quartets you
know you’re in for something special
to come, and there is no disappointment.
In Op. 59 #3, last movement, they challenge
the Vegh Quartet to a race, and at 5.25
they win it, although the Vegh version
at 6.24 has long been held to be the
fastest possible performance (the score
says only allegro molto!). But
then the Talich quartet does it in 6.11,
proving once again that subjective musical
time cannot be measured scientifically.
In Op. 130, the presto
has never been played so affectingly;
the Alla danza tedesca is charming,
even lilting, but does not make you
reach for your seasick remedy as do
some performances. Their Cavatina
is perfectly balanced between the symphonic
and the intimate, the grand and the
graceful.
The Hollywood Quartet
might have been called the "Slatkin
Quartet." They play with the same
kind of grandeur and
beauty that one sees in an Ansel Adams
photograph. Had they recorded the middle
quartets, they might have played them
like the Talich quartet plays them,
with just a touch of Dvořák, more
like an Elliot Porter colour photograph
of a forest clearing. Unfortunately,
to my taste, the Talich do not have
the rigor of style to do full justice
to either the early or the late quartets.
The box proclaims "88
page booklet in English, German, and
French," but what that boils down
to is 28 pages of English essay by B.
H. Haggin, including music score examples,
and the same essay, without examples,
in German and French. Mr. Haggin suggests
that the Op. 133 Grosse Fuge
is "inaccessible" to many
music lovers even after repeated exposure.
This was originally the final movement
to the Quartet Op. 130, but was replaced
by the movement currently played. In
some recent performances (e.g., that
by the Berg Quartet, but not the Guarneri
Quartet performance under discussion)
both movements are played, first the
Grosse Fuge as movement #6, and
then the later finale which now becomes
movement #7, making this a very long
quartet. With modern CD player-changers,
it is easy enough to program the movements
to play this way if you wish, so this
juxtaposition of movements is not a
material consideration. The Vegh Quartet
disks program the Grosse Fuge
after Op. 130, so you can hear the movements
in that order without having to reprogram
the machine.
The Hollywood Quartet
play the "inaccessible" Grosse
Fuge more beautifully than you would
imagine possible. The Vegh Quartet achieve
a similar effect by playing slowly to
give time to form the notes, but the
work then becomes long and tends to
the pedantic, even though their overall
timing is 40 seconds shorter than the
Guarneri version. But Beethoven was
an angry man and he enjoyed writing
dissonance like other men enjoy smashing
their fists into the wall. The long
opening of that fugue beginning at bar
30 and continuing for several pages
is deliberately ugly music, and the
Guarneris play it as ugly as they can,
even emphasising the dissonances with
vibrato. Then, when things sweeten up,
they sweeten them way up and
they stay there, giving a typical Beethovenian
sun-after-the-storm æsthetic to
the work. This is the most convincing
performance I’ve heard, although all
three are excellent.
The opening of the
Op. 135 might be a good introduction
to this set if you get the chance to
audition it, or if you are trying to
convince a friend who doesn’t like this
music. The first two minutes will give
you Beethoven with grace and charm,
two things he practically never has
at all, and then on to tonal variety
you never suspected in this work, and
rhythm, drama, even fun. If there’s
a better version of these quartets I’ve
not heard it.
Paul Shoemaker
Guarneri Quartet: Arnold Steinhardt, John Dalley,
vv; Michael Tree; vla; Michael Soyer, vc.