Johann Wenzel Kalliwoda is one of the most underrated composers of the
romantic era, and this reissue offers us a new chance to hear his superb
string quartets. The original release was praised by my colleague
Michael Cookson as "exciting discoveries", and "highly
gratifying quartets" for "admirers of Haydn, Mozart and Mendelssohn". Throw
in Schumann and you've got a good description of the wide appeal of this
excellent music.
The three quartets deserve a firm place in the early romantic repertoire.
Aside from total originality, Kalliwoda has many gifts of the major
composer: fine craft and skill in writing each part; catchy melody - the
disc starts with a compelling tune in E minor. Add to these, formal
ingenuity and the ability to write music that moves in unexpected,
satisfying directions.
Each quartet is full of small creative touches, like the pizzicato scherzo
in Quartet No. 1, foreshadowing Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony and evoking a
chorus of mandolins. The second quartet's brief scherzo jumps from minor to
major keys as if it was by a young Brahms. Its equally brief slow movement
comes breathtakingly close to writing out the tune "O Canada" [track 7,
1:16].
After the cleverness of the first two quartets, No. 3 is a bit of a
retrograde step, since it reaches back to the 18
th century
tradition of the first violin occupying the foreground and the other three
instruments supporting. On the other hand, there are still places where I
smile, like the first movement's coda, where an increasingly busy, virtuosic
passage dissipates instantly with two light pizzicato chords. The scherzo
could have been orchestrated and inserted into a Schumann symphony.
This Talich Quartet disc earned a lot of praise when it first appeared,
and still deserves it all. They truly play the works as if nobody has told
them Kalliwoda is obscure or unappreciated. The recordings date back to just
2005, although surprisingly La Dolce Volta has re-mastered them anyways. The
disc sounds great. One caveat about the packaging: I'm usually a fan of
cardboard slipcases over plastic jewel boxes, but this one is odd. To remove
the CD, you must tug it out of one cardboard sleeve; to remove the booklet,
you must tug it out of another sleeve. It's unusually awkward. Still, if you
didn't get the original release, you ought to have this.
Brian Reinhart
