César Franck (1822-1890)
Piano Quintet in F minor, 2nd Movement - Lento con molto sentimento (1879)
Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
String Quartet in G minor, Op 10 (1893)
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
String Quartet in F major (1903)
Olga Loeser-Lebert (piano)
Léner Quartet
rec. 1923-33, Clerkenwell Road Studios, London (Franck), unknown location (Debussy) and Abbey Road Studio No.3, London (Ravel)
PRISTINE AUDIO PACM116 [63]
Whilst the London String Quartet was away touring and recording in America, the Léner Quartet was quickly signed by Columbia, who needed the fill the lacuna, and so began a long series of recordings for the company that began in November 1922.
Pristine Audio has been exploring this sequence and alights on the classic French pairing of Debussy and Ravel whilst adding a Belgian bonbon in shape of a single movement from Franck’s Piano Quintet. This last was recorded in November 1923 with the pianist Olga Loeser-Lebert, better known for her later contribution to the quartet’s recording of Dvořák’s Piano Quintet. The Franck was recorded on two sides of a 78 and is one of the ensemble’s rarer discs, rich in its trademark saturated tonal resources and generous use of portamenti, generous even for the era, in fact. One can hear cellist Imre Hartman’s powerful contribution to a recording that is quite vividly recorded for the time though it’s true that Jenő Léner is guilty of a brief moment of sour intonation toward the end. By now they were on take four so perhaps everyone concerned thought that enough was enough by this point and they’d leave it at that. Things were rather different in the Clerkenwell Road studios in the early 20s.
The Debussy Quartet followed in March 1928. Back in 1923 they’d set down the Andantino movement in an acoustic recording but now they took advantage of the microphone to make one of the earliest recordings of the work. You may well have thought that because of its heavily vibrated playing, rich vibratos and Hungarian ethos the quartet would be stylistically and aesthetically unsuitable to this of all quartets, but I think that would be to misjudge the nature of the playing. Transitions are elastic but seamless and they take an incisive tempo in the slow movement, keeping the quartet moving and never giving in to the lure of expansive exaggeration. There’s nothing Gallic about the quartet’s corporate sound but then Gallic players varied enormously. The Capet recorded this quartet in the same year, 1928, and their very discreet employment of vibrato is at violent odds to the Léner’s playing. A few years
later the Calvet also recorded it and they were closer to the Capet than to the Léner. By 1940 the Bouillon Quartet waded in with an astonishingly fleet reading. Some may find elements of the Léner’s performance sentimentalised, not least in the Andantino, though it reveals a strong consistency with their acoustic recording. The finale is taken at its word; Trés modéré. This means it’s much slower than the three other quartets cited. French groups of this time seemed to cohere around a timing of 6:10 (Bouillon) to 6:50 (Calvet) – the Capet take 6:30 - but the Lener take 7:50. Still, its moods are well negotiated and perhaps the Léner set established something of a precedent, as their performance throughout, in timings, but not sonority, reminds me strongly of the Galimir Quartet’s Vanguard LP of the 50s.
The Ravel Quartet followed in 1933. The Léner’s portamenti somehow seem to suit the Ravelian ethos, where sensitive shaping marries a sharp sense of characterisation full of colour and saturated sonority – not the first thing, admittedly, one would expect from a performance of the Ravel. Nonetheless, articulation is splendid in the Scherzo and though there’s clearly the expected expressive and tonal density in the slow movement – without the lightness and clarity of the French-Belgian school with its wristiness and much lighter sonority – the Léner manages to stamp its own personality on the work. If one excludes two of the most volatile French groups of the time – the Bouillon, once again, and the Krettly (recorded in 1929, a couple of years after the Ravel-supervised International String Quartet recording) – the Léner sound pretty similar tempo-wise to the Capet and Calvet, especially the former.
Strong dynamics, tonal breadth, abundant use of portamenti, flexible metrics – all these, and more, mark out the Léner in this repertoire.
The transfers are really excellent. There’s very little surface noise in the Debussy, in particular, and the Ravel sounds just as good. Mark Obert-Thorn has done an exceptionally fine job here.
Jonathan Woolf
Published: October 4, 2022
