Though the word Scandinavia,
which is blazoned on one of the booklet
pages, may seem inappropriate for Röntgen
he had strong connections with Grieg,
whose second quartet he completed and
edited for performance. There’s certainly
some cachet for the Matangi Quartet
who have given what must be one of the
very few recordings of the 1922 Quartettino
– so called because of its length. It
is coupled with the equally little known
but much later and very different quartet
of David Monrad Johansen. Perhaps inevitably
these are harnessed to the Grieg Quartet
in G minor. I appreciate the commercial
imperatives that might have suggested
it, though another novelty would have
been of even greater interest – another
of the Röntgen quartets would have
been valuable given their undeserved
absence from concert programmes and
recording studios.
The Quartettino was
written as Röntgen approached retirement,
something I’d thought might have been
the case but which was not mentioned
in the booklet notes. I had to go the
composer’s website, since Cobbett’s
Encyclopaedia generally only refers
to his earlier 1870s and 1880s chamber
works. This is a work suffused with
his warm-hearted lyricism and a certain
amount of veiled yearning all subsumed
in the first movement at least to moments
of chaste Renaissance profile. At less
than ten minutes this two-movement work
hardly outstays its welcome; so brisk
and joyful is the slim second movement
that I played it again for sheer delight.
Johansen’s 1969 Quartet
has its moments of abrasion and discord
but also much that is quiet, or at least
quiescent, and decidedly interior with
the music at points coming to a standstill.
The second movement, an Allegro Vivace,
functions as a nimble, witty, textually
free Scherzo whilst the slow movement
is the heart of work – a viola-warm
and effectively sustained Largo whose
long, often unison lines contain the
odd ecstatic outburst. For me however
the passage in the finale in which a
Renaissance-sounding canon emerges is
the most arresting moment. This unfolds
gently, to be banished by more dramatically
incursive writing, only to reappear
– unchanged and serene; a most beautifully
constructed movement and it’s something
that links it to the Röntgen.
I quite enjoyed the
performance of the Grieg; it’s a relatively
lightly bowed account when judged against
some of the disc-leaders in this work
and apt therefore to sound a little
undernourished. There are also moments
when rhythms aren’t sprung as tightly
as they might be. It’s certainly not
an over-lingering or sentimental reading
– the Romanze is rather dry-eyed – and
when you go back to the classic 1930s
Budapest Quartet set, now on Biddulph,
you find an exhilarating sense of weight
and colour and invincible rhythmic drama.
It would have been
good to have some historical or contextual
background notes for the two less-well
known works but with decent sound these
novelties certainly make their mark.
Jonathan Woolf
Matangi Quartet 
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