It’s good that the Artis’s performances of Zemlinsky’s quartets
have now definitively returned to the catalogues. Water may
have flowed under the bridge since their 1997 recordings, not
least the Schoenberg Quartet’s survey of all the quartet music
on Chandos CHAN 9772(2), but the Viennese quartet’s performances
stand up remarkably well. They also compare favourably with
those of the LaSalle Quartet who were, in the 1970s, the only
viable proponents for these works.
What remains so good about the Artis’s playing is not simply
its resilience of rhythm and the sense of colours it evokes,
but the energy it generates too. This is certainly the case
in the A major quartet of 1896, a work that doesn’t sound very
much like the ‘Zemlinsky’ that we may have come to know from
his Expressionist writing. Indeed it’s as well to be reminded
that Zemlinsky wasn’t a native Viennese, and in that he was
hardly alone. His father was a Slovak who had gravitated to
the imperial capital, and there remains in his son’s early music
something of that ethos, one which will sound to most like a
Bohemian-cum-Slavic strain. It’s exemplified in the intensity
of the Allegretto’s B section, a characteristic example of his
folkloric influence, but it’s there in the opening movement
too. The urgency of this movement comes as a fine contrast,
whilst the finale sounds highly engaging in the Artis’s hands.
There was a gap of very nearly two decades before Zemlinsky
embarked on his second quartet. There are good biographical
reasons why this work is so much more pronounced in respect
of its heightened emotional drama. These principally concerned
the fact that Zemlinsky’s sister, Mathilde, who had married
Arnold Schoenberg in 1901, subsequently had an affair with the
young painter, Richard Gerstl. When Mathilde returned to Schoenberg,
principally for the sake of her children, Gerstl hanged himself.
The relationship between Schoenberg and Zemlinsky took a buffeting
and its resonance was strongly active when Zemlinsky wrote his
complex, highly contrapuntal, polyrhythmic, and virtuosic Op.15.
It’s cast in one vast 40 minute movement, though it’s fairly
obviously sub-divided into sections, and Nimbus separately tracks
them. It opens with tumultuous complexity and a palpable sense
of dislocation, before moving on to a truly desolate Andante
mosso section which opens with despairing soliloquies, but
also contains more loquacious flurries, and a final thwacking
pizzicato that leads into the ensuing section marked simply
‘Schnell’. This is slithery and terse though the music does
stabilise in the Im selben Tempo passage, only to relapse
into brittle drive, then thins in texture as the slow final
section appears. Thus the work ends quietly, uneasily. It is
a deeply serious quartet, a study in oscillating states of being
as well as being splendidly crafted and superbly maintained
throughout its long length.
Once again the Artis responds with full bodied Viennese tone,
but also quick-witted rhythmic spring. Given that they are also
well recorded, with finely annotated notes, the Artis still
rank very high in this repertoire and are worthy of serious
consideration.
Jonathan Woolf
See also review
by Gavin Dixon
Artis Quartett Wien
