Nicolai MIASKOVSKY (1881-1950)
String Quartet No.1 in A minor Op.33 No.1 (1929-30) [28:26]
String Quartet No.13 in A minor Op.86 (1949) [23:42]
Renoir Quartet
rec. June 2009, Saint-Marcel Lutheran Church, Paris
AR RE-SE 2010-1 [52:50]
What was it about ‘waiting’ and ‘buses’? No sooner
has the Borodin Quartet unveiled its recording of Miaskovsky’s Quartet
No.13 [Onyx 4051 - see review]
than the young French Renoir Quartet appears to trump them by adding the First
as well. This bookending device ensures that the disc bears a ‘first
and last thoughts’ patina. Miaskovsky delayed writing - or to put it
more accurately, releasing for public consumption - a String Quartet until
he was nearly fifty. His final work in the form was completed the year before
his death.
The First Quartet in point of fact was the third of the Op.33 to be written.
It’s an intensely chromatic, slithering and complex work entirely characteristic
of his mid to late 1920s techniques. It abounds in fierce contrastive material
and tension-sapping dissonance - listen to the cello’s winding line
through the thickets of the texture or the ambiguous lightening of that same
density. The Renoir has been accorded a warm acoustic, though it’s certainly
close and detailed enough to catch some sniffing. Their approach is a degree
more romanticised than that of the Taneyev Quartet, whose cycle of the entire
quartets has been reissued by Northern Flowers [No.1 is on NF/PMA 9950]. The
Renoir takes a heavier bow than the wristier, more abrasive Taneyev, and this
means they miss something of the angularity of the chromaticism in this work.
I was however rather taken by one thing in particular in this performance
and that’s what the booklet writer asserts is the jazz element of the
slow movement; what he adeptly terms a ‘stylised Blues’ - and
that’s the way in which the Renoir duly plays it. The slower tempo of
the Taneyev gives it a wholly different character, a highly expressive chant-like
melancholy. I’d align this movement more with the Russian side of things
but if the Renoir wants to see the Quartet through the prism, let’s
say, of the slow movement of Ravel’s Violin Sonata (completed in 1927)
then I’m happy to enjoy the unpredictable results. I think most auditors
would agree through that in the quicksilver elements of the finale, the leaner
and more variegated sonorities of the Taneyev are preferable to the rather
homogenised and all-purpose Renoir attack.
His last quartet was written in 1949 and was dedicated to the devoted Beethoven
Quartet, who premiered it. This plunges headlong into lyric melee. Miaskovsky
was fond of “fantastico” as a scherzo designation and this one
is vivacity itself, albeit one tinged with a contrastive Mussorgskian-hued
central panel - bronzed and powerful. The refined melodic strength of the
slow movement never elides into stolidity though its central section, as so
often with the composer, mines even graver sentiments. The finale returns
immediately to the brio of the earlier movements. High spirits are paramount.
The Borodin Quartet (Onyx) keep things moving just that bit better than the
Renoir, though their approaches are not dissimilar in terms of bowing and
tonal blending. There’s a degree more aeration of the textures however
in the Russian performance but where things do markedly differ is, again,
in the context of the slow movement where the Renoir is brisk and light, and
the Borodin relaxed, and the more nostalgic. Again I should note that the
Taneyev recording is on NF/PMA9954, and their recording remains the most vital
and engaging available.
That said the Beethoven (Westminster) and Borodin (Melodiya, in their earlier
incarnation on LP, and on Onyx as above) both recorded No.13. The Kopelman
recording of it has recently been released on Nimbus NI5827 coupled with Shostakovich’s
First and Eighth Quartets. I certainly think it’s high time that the
Beethoven Quartet’s less well known recordings were reissued - someone
is going to tell me they’re available as downloads - and that includes
their Miaskovsky.
Where does this leave us? An intriguingly Gallic slant illuminates the Renoir’s
No.1 and No.13 has a brisk, no nonsense slow movement. The performances are
finely played, well recorded - if too ‘sniffy’ - and will bring
up short even seasoned admirers of the composer in No.1.
Jonathan Woolf
An intriguingly Gallic slant.