All stages of the
Budapest Quartet’s discography are fortunately covered in the
current catalogues. Their very earliest discs tend to come and
go but the 1930s and later have been reasonably well documented,
not least their Library of Congress recitals (on Bridge) and
later incarnations into the 1950s and 1960s (Sony et al).
Biddulph gives us a trio of Mozart quartets from a three-year
period between 1932 and 35. The catalogues of the time were
pretty much bereft of K 590, which makes the Budapest’s
recording so valuable. K499 had been done by the Prisca for
Polydor and K465 had always been popular; around this time it
was recorded variously by the Pascal (for French Odeon), the
Kolisch and the Loewenguth; the Lener had recorded a late acoustic
as well.
Nevertheless
there is cachet in these Budapest traversals. The Dissonance is bright and effervescent; the
newish Russian pairing of fiddlers Roisman and Schneider blend
gracefully in the opening movement though the slow movement
is prey to something of a recurring problem, one of slightly
manicured phrasing in Andantes; prayerful certainly but not
altogether convincing. But the Scherzo recovers ground with
lissom elegance in the trio and Roisman scores highly in the
finale with his fine bowing and the quartet pays attention to
corporate dynamics. The Hoffmeister has real grazioso
elegance and once more quite an intense slow movement – though
this one is more natural and unaffected than the Dissonance
– and a spirited finale. The Quartet in F K590 was recorded
in 1935 and though there’s a higher ration of surface noise
there’s also a greater degree of definition and presence. Inner
voices are palpable and calibrated with care; here they take
a good, flowing tempo in the slow movement and catch the off-kilter
wit of the minuet as much as the drone-like effects in the finale.
Biddulph
has not detailed original issue or matrix numbers so I can only
infer that they have used commercial pressings. There’s some
chuffing at the end of the slow movement of the Hoffmeister
and K590 has retained a relatively high level of shellac noise.
Otherwise the livery is in the now accustomed Biddulph house
style and notes are by Tully Potter, whom I congratulate for
not having mentioned the Busch Quartet once.
Jonathan
Woolf
Budapest
String Quartet
