This quartet has been getting some golden reviews of late and
I’ve read some highly flattering critiques of their latest disc,
this all-French programme, which made me keen to hear it.
The Quatuor Ebčne certainly makes
a lovely sound, very Gallic. Their corporate sonority is essentially
light, with delicate bowing and athletic rhythmic playing being
powerful components of their strengths. They tend to take relatively
slow tempo – not necessarily egregiously so in the context of
contemporary performances - but certainly so in the context of
the lineage of French quartets in these three works. There’s nothing
brittle, or biting or over vibrated about this playing – it’s
homogenous tonally and timbrally, has been thought out with great
sensitivity and care, and strikes the ear as frequently of the
highest quality.
Yes I know – you can sense a ‘but’. Before we get to the ‘buts’ though,
a word about the performances. The most outstanding thing about
the recital is that the old army issue Debussy-Ravel line-up has
been augmented by Fauré’s elusive 1924 masterpiece – the work
he never lived to hear premiered. This receives a beautifully
subtle and mellifluous reading; it’s deft, wristy, misty, beautifully
judged as to apposite bow weight and languorous. And here’s the
‘but’. It’s also too lateral and the tempi are too slow. Turn
to the classic Krettly Quartet 78 set of 1928 and you hear how
much more assertive, how much more interventionist Fauré readings
were at the time - and how they’ve become if not insipid at least
too gauze-like for their own good. They compound the ‘late Fauré’
problem this way. The corporate refinement of the Ebčne is certainly thrilling but it misses the athletic
paragraphal sense of older quartets where things are, to the benefit
of the music, more externalised. This is certainly the case with
the slow movement. The finale’s pizzicati ring out defiantly with
the Krettly; with the Ebčne they’re more subsumed into the sub-stratum of the
sonority. The rise and fall of the melodic line is more sharply
engraved by the older group; I happen to feel that if you were
coming afresh to this work you’d feel it, not for the first time,
beautiful but essentially pastel shaded and wishy washy. Turn
to the Krettly for a totally different experience.
For the other two works I turned to the old Bouillon Quartet in their
wartime readings – not an obvious choice I admit, which is why
I did it. They did have some zippy ideas as to tempo. Still the
Ebčne’s Debussy stands up to scrutiny for much of the
time. I happen to prefer a more fantastical approach such as the
Bouillon provide or the Galimir or the London in a live Library of Congress performance (not commercially
available). Older groups tended to take the second movement much
more quickly than nowadays – the Galimir took 3:45,
the London much the same, the Capet 3:38, the Bouillon 3:36. The Ebčne take 4:01 and it matters. Still a
lovely sounding performance that remains – I need to add, for
me – a bit static and under-projected.
Same with the Ravel, really. I appreciate that performances of this quartet
are getting slower and slower. Some group somewhere will soon
take ten minutes over the first movement. The Ebčne take 8:50.
The Bouillon is amazingly quick at 6:44. It’s very difficult to
make things cohere at a slower tempo; the Ravel ‘supervised’ International
Quartet 78 performance supposedly enshrines his thoughts on the
matter and that’s taken at a relatively fast lick. But it’s true
that there’s plenty of suave phrasing throughout in the
Ebčne reading and the familiar individual and corporate
strengths are again strongly evident.
So I did, despite appearances to the contrary, find these performances
engaging. Perhaps the nature of my disagreement with them indicates
their ultimate strength. One could hardly deny the beauty of
sound, the sympathetic recording quality or the dedication shown
by these four young musicians.
Jonathan Woolf
Quatuor Eb
