Vagn HOLMBOE (1909-1996)
String Quartets - Volume 1
String Quartet No. 1, Op. 46 (1949) [27:11]
String Quartet No. 3, Op. 48 (1949) [22:49]
String Quartet No. 15, Op. 135 (1977-78) [17:10]
Nightingale String Quartet
rec. Royal Danish Academy of Music, Copenhagen, September 2017 – November 2018
DACAPO 8.226212 [67:10]
This is the first of a projected cycle of the Holmboe Quartets but it’s not Dacapo’s first cycle. That honour fell to the Kontra Quartet which recorded the whole cycle on individual volumes between 1992 and 2000, subsequently collated into a 7-CD box (see review) on Dacapo 8.207001. The disc relevant to the CD under review is the first of that box, which contains the First, Third and Fourth Quartets. However, Dacapo has decided not to follow the precedent of that earlier set, which was to present the quartets in largely chronological order, and has instead included Nos 1, 3 and 15 for its inaugural release.
By the time of his first quartet in 1949 Holmboe had already written ten unpublished quartets over a period of two decades. He was now 40 and shortly before his death, as Jens Cornelius’ enlightening notes relate, Holmboe wrote that this quartet marked a turning point in his development. It’s clear that he had profoundly encoded Bartókian procedure. The very first musical gesture, a long viola solo drenched in melancholia, quickly alerts one to Bartók’s own use of this in his final quartet. Solo entries which duly follow in this movement, whether singly or in parallel, reinforce this inheritance and indebtedness, and nor does the emergence of a Romanian dance theme in any way lessen the thought. In the Adagio, over a kind of bleak drone, a series of variations emerge some cloaked in weird sonorities, some firefly fleet, others coolly slow. Holmboe professed himself mystified by his own music here, but I think we can agree that music like this incarnates his approach to form and sonority very precisely. By contrast the finale is joyful and full of excitement, with a more skirling dance rhythm in the B section, and triumphant chords that end the work on a truly emphatic note of finality.
By the end of the same year Holmboe had written his first three quartets. No.3 is in five movements but more compressed than the First. Here the Bartókian dance rhythms are evident but somewhat lighter in texture than was the case in No.1. The use of five movements, too, gifts the work a more immediate sense of contrast (and links it to Bartók’s fourth and fifth quartets) with a splendid Chaconne operating as the music’s axis point in the third movement. Holmboe ensures there are constant variations of colour and texture in the fast fourth movement and the finale, a Lento, offers a satisfying constructional arc to the opening slow movement. This is music of perfect architecture and finely judged expressive temperature, in which the quotations from the opening Lento draw things to a poised conclusion.
In 1978 he completed Quartet No.15 which opens with what he called ‘seagull’s cry’. This was a shard of a musical figure that unites his last three quartets and it also points to the concision of material in these works, notably the Fifteenth. Bartók’s influence had been long since assimilated and the language is now Holmboe’s own – music of malleable but taut vitality, and expressive nuance in the chorale of the funereal third movement.
The performances of both the Nightingale and Kontra string quartets are quite similar though I rather prefer the faster tempi the Nightingale takes in No.3. The Nightingale’s cycle of Langgaard’s quartets (see review) is one I hugely admired and represents a valuable contribution to the composer’s discography and I feel the same way about their inaugural volume of the Holmboe Quartets. You needn’t necessarily switch allegiance from the Kontra cycle – they are splendid – but the Nightingale offer balanced and expressive immediacy in excellent sound.
Jonathan Woolf
