Here’s an interesting disc of Danish string
quartets from around the year 1860. They don’t really sound ethnically
Danish, imprinted as they are by German teachers. C.F.E. Horneman, composer
of almost all this music, wrote his first of two quartets while a student
in Leipzig, and the other one a year after returning home.
The Horneman quartets bear fingerprints of Mendelssohn, Beethoven and
maybe Grieg. The second quartet, especially, feels like a traditional
Germanic quartet sped up to a refreshing pace and filled with quick,
memorable little melodic ideas. The pieces are compact in structure
and aim to divert rather than to be profound. The only real dead spot
in either is the slow movement of the first, which I found a little
dry and blandly German. Horneman did study at Mendelssohn’s music
academy, even training with violinist Ferdinand David, who premiered
the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto.
Horneman had a cousin, Asger Hamerik, who became a rather more distinctive
composer during his maturity, and seems to have already been a more
distinctive one at the age of sixteen. Hamerik spent several decades
heading up one of the first and foremost music schools in the United
States, Baltimore’s Peabody Institute. Famous alumni, including
the preparatory school for youth: Philip Glass, Hilary Hahn, André
Watts. Hamerik’s little
Quartetto, a teenage piece that
lasts just six minutes, begins with a striking idea and gets a lot of
work done in its tiny frame, although the more lyrical secondary material
is second-rate and the loudest moments return a jarring amount of reverb
in the sound-space.
The Arild Quartet, making their debut here, sound like very good players,
whom Dacapo should be glad to have on the team. Aside from the aforementioned
reverb, there is little to complain about from the sound, and the booklet
essay on Horneman and Hamerik is a model for the industry. The playing
time is 53 minutes, but these two composers didn’t oblige us with
more quartets, after all. A pity, especially, that Hamerik did not return
to the medium in his maturity.
Brian Reinhart
See also review by
Byzantion
