Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)
String Quartet No.1 in D minor Op.7 (1904-5)
String Quartet No.3 Op.30 (1927)
Gringolts Quartet
rec. 2021, SRF Studio, Zurich
Reviewed in surround
BIS BIS2567 SACD [80]
Schoenberg’s First String Quartet predates his Second by only a few years and occupies the same turbulent dramatic world. Looking back at my earlier review of the Second and Fourth Quartets by the Gringolts Quartet I drew attention to the composer’s efforts at this time to move away from expressionism and find a new voice. I described the Second Quartet as exposing the fracture between the old and new mode. With this second disc there is a chance to listen at length to that old Schoenberg. The First Quartet is the longest instrumental piece he ever wrote, and it is all as passionate and dramatic as his early masterpiece for string sextet Verklärte Nacht. In his own commentaries he explains how he planned the four movements as a continuous whole, with the first movement, scherzo and trio, adagio and finale each having a double function: firstly each movement has its own structure and secondly all four together work as a large scale structure analogous to that of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. There is much of interest in both the excellent note by Arnold Whittall and at
the Arnold Schönberg Centre website. The composer’s early programme notes referencing “rejection, defiance” and “desperation” to “enthusiastic strength to fight, development of fantasy, energy” and “greatest intoxication of the senses,” to “quiet happiness and the return of peace and harmony” do much to emphasize the feelings in the quartet and informs the Gringolts Quartet’s performance. But Schoenberg wanted the music to be taken as a well-formed composition and not a mere outpouring of emotion. It did not go down well at the first performance, despite the support of Gustav Mahler who remonstrated with a noisy audience member, only to be told in no uncertain terms that Mahler’s own compositions were given the same treatment! From the safe distance of over a century and the experience of so much other expressionist music from the period it is much easier to accept and indeed enjoy this marvellous work. Comparing this new disc with the old La Salle recording from the 1970s revealed that the older recording was much faster. The Gringolts do not seem slow, indeed so detailed is their reading that it seems faster than the slightly smoother La Salles. Both represent the peak of performance quality and indeed of sound quality.
The third quartet from 1927 is a more angular piece and sounds closer to the neoclassical style of Martinů, Stravinsky and Hindemith, but since, like the much later 4th Quartet, it is definitely written using Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method it is audibly apart from those contemporaries. Here the technical virtuosity of the Gringolts pays huge dividends for they are able to play it so accurately and with such apparent ease that what the notes describe as the “laborious details” do not get in the way of an emotionally dramatic experience. The composer was emphatically against the sort of detailed analysis that emphasized the atonal and serial techniques used rather than the traditional structures he built with these materials. This quartet has a sonata form first movement, dance rhythms, an intermezzo third movement, and even a rondo finale. It displays what he learned from Bach and Beethoven but dressed in modern sounds. He said, “I can’t utter too many warnings against overrating these analyses, since after all they only lead to what I have always been dead against: seeing how it is done; whereas I have always helped people to see: what it is!”
As before this BIS SACD is beautifully recorded by Swiss Radio, well presented and with scholarly notes. Very highly recommended.
Dave Billinge
