Végh – The Chamber Musician
Ludwig van BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)
Violin Sonata No. 10 in G major, Op. 96 (1812) [28:46]
String Quartet Op 59 No 3 (1805-06) [29:41]
Arnold SCHOENBERG (1874-1951)
Pierrot Lunaire Op.21 (1913) [37:49]
Franz SCHUBERT (1797-1828)
String Quintet in C Major, D 956 (1828) [44:23]
Sándor Végh (violin)
Végh Quartet
Paul Baumgartner (piano)
Jeanne Héricard (voice)
Hans-Jürgen Möhring (flute)
Paul Blöcher (clarinet)
Pietro Scarpini (piano)
Éva Czakó (cello)
rec. WDR, 1957 (Beethoven Sonata) and 1952 (Schoenberg); SRF, 1954 (Beethoven Quartet) and 1948 (Schubert)
BMC CD262 [66:36 + 74:05]
Budapest Music Center Records (BMC) has recently released a number of double-CDs devoted to the art of Sándor Végh in his roles as concerto soloist, chamber recitalist, quartet leader and ensemble partner. These valuable historical documents are largely, but not exclusively, the products of German radio broadcasts of the 1950s and come with identical booklet notes.
The release under review captures him as primarius of his quartet and as a sonata player. In the latter role he and Swiss pianist Paul Baumgartner are heard in a 1957 performance of Beethoven’s Op.96 sonata. This is very much a meeting of musical equals, Végh being too subtle a musician to want to subvert the proprieties of duo performance – some of his violinistic colleagues had fewer scruples – and so the result is a consonant one. Phrasing is detailed in a relaxed approach to the first movement with a fully expressive but not over-vibrated Adagio. The finale is not over-scaled, the performance remaining a truly sympathetic one. If one misses, from time to time, the depth of the live wartime Szigeti-Arrau collaboration or the same violinist’s post-war live reading with Schnabel, Végh’s approach is still enriching, if not necessarily exalted.
His quartet plays Beethoven’s Rasumovsky Quartet No.3 in January 1954 in a SRF broadcast. A couple of years earlier the group had recorded the cycle of quartets for the Haydn Society, an undertaking that was very well transferred by Music & Arts CD1084 in a 7-CD box. The approach in the broadcasting studio is, perhaps inevitably, consistent with their cycle. The reading is direct, unsentimental and somewhat objectified. With clarity and few expressive gestures that obtrude, rhythmic detail is precise, pizzicati are well balanced, and tempi don’t linger. Their colleagues in the Hungarian Quartet also recorded a cycle around this time and they prove to be the more communicative interpreters; as the years went by a greater sense of musical breadth entered into the Végh’s performances but this reading represents them as fine exponents of the repertoire.
Earlier, in July 1948, they were joined by cellist Éva Czakó (1926-78) for a reading of Schubert’s Quintet in C major. She was the wife of the group’s violist György Janzer and both were members of Arthur Grumiaux’s string trio with whom they made a number of recordings, including a wonderful set of Beethoven’s string trios. Comparing the Végh in 1948 and in their famed collaboration with Pablo Casals in Prades in 1961 is to do no more than to note the extraordinary encouragement of expressive intensity and breadth brought to bear by the cellist. Predictably each movement is much tighter in this radio broadcast, which is around four minutes brisker than the Prades reading. To those unsympathetic to Casals’ heavenly length the earlier reading, cooler, more classical, but hardly devoid of feeling, will be welcome. This, like the Beethoven quartet, was taped for Swiss Radio (SRF) whilst the remainder of the programme comes from Cologne radio.
The final work is Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, where the quartet was joined by vocalist Jeanne Héricard and a raft of fine instrumentalists anchored by the great Italian pianist Pietro Scarpini, a most impressive exponent of Schoenberg’s Concerto and other works. You can hear another broadcast performance of his Pierrot lunaire in a RAI traversal in 1960 on Rhine RH-010 (see review) where the vocalist is Magda Laszlo. In Cologne, the range of moods and expressions are readily brought out and the quartet’s sense of colour equally in a well-balanced studio recording from November 1957.
This is a notably well-selected pair of discs that reveals different facets of the violinist’s art from the late 1940s onwards.
Jonathan Woolf
