How much difference two or three hundred years have made to the string
quartet, and indeed how much has changed since 1962, when the LaSalle
Quartet premiered Krzystof Penderecki’s
String Quartet No. 1.
Josef Haydn might perhaps have wondered why on earth composers were
still using such an antiquated medium for expressing themselves in such
changed times, but if he had heard the works on this recording he would,
no doubt after plucking at his wig in confounded agitation and declaring
that the world had gone mad, have to admit that this combination of
instruments can indeed adapt itself to almost any compositional idiom.
Just as a classic car can do a circuit of a modern race track and have
us on the edge of our seats, so the string quartet can excite our senses
and enrich our lives, and this excellent recording from the Royal String
Quartet brings us into contact with some now classic examples of what
the 20
th century made of its 18
th century ancestor.
Penderecki’s
String Quartet No. 3 might be the best place to
start when approaching this disc. This relatively recent work is harder
to find on disc than the others, and the Royal String Quartet play it
with passion and verve. Penderecki’s remarkable range of effects and
his emotional twists and turns take us on a roller-coaster ride which
ranges from bizarre waltzes, persistent harmonic pendulums somewhat
reminiscent of Shostakovich, and moments of rare pathos and tenderness.
This work appeared 40 years after the
String Quartet No. 2,
and Penderecki’s change to a more romantic style infuses the third quartet,
filling it with points of recognition such as lyrical melodic lines
and urgent rhythmic passages. This in many ways is the star work of
this programme, and the performance on this recording does justice to
the work’s intensity and sheer variety of expression.
Penderecki’s first two string quartets were written amidst Poland’s
revolutionary preoccupation with ‘sonorism’, an approach which broke
with traditions of form and notation, often working with textures and
timbres, with fields of sound and a direct paeans of communication rather
than outmoded aesthetics of harmonic convention and cadence. The Royal
String Quartet’s performances of these earlier works are very good,
and if you are more interested in having this complete set ‘in the bag’
than much else then these recordings will do very nicely. More has however
been said on this music in the past, and more emphatically.
Competitors in recordings of Penderecki’s string quartets include that
on the DUX label (see
review),
which I unfortunately didn’t have to hand for comparison. The LaSalle
Quartet’s recording of the work they premiered, the
String Quartet
No. 1 plus their recording of the Lutoslawski
String Quartet
is also one we need to be aware of (see
review).
This recording originated on the Deutsche Grammophon label, and their
performance of Penderecki’s
String Quartet No. 1 has a closer
perspective than that of the Royal String Quartet, allowing us to feel
the sheer physicality of the strings bending and the air being pounded
by the player’s almost brutal interaction with their instruments. The
LaSalle quartet’s timing is close to that of the Royal String Quartet,
but makes a more vivid impression through digging that much deeper.
Penderecki’s first two quartets can also be found on a Wergo album of
his chamber music, WER6258-2, with the Silesian String Quartet going
at his
String Quartet No. 1 with even more vigour, though set
within a big acoustic this can on occasion be a bit aversive and over
the top. The
String Quartet No. 2 in this instance is genuinely
terrifying, and I can only urge you to try it so you can understand
what I mean. I’m afraid the Royal String Quartet is nowhere near as
nightmarish.
Going back to the DG/Brilliant Classics comparison, with the Lutoslawski
String Quartet the differences are initially less crucial in
the sparing open spaces of the
Introductory movement, though
the LaSalle players give more of an impression of human voices in the
way they communicate in the second
Main movement, charging
at and churning the response of the listener. The Royal String Quartet
is very good, but you never quite escape the sense of instruments being
played strangely, rather than entering the empty streets of a surreal
dream world and encountering a crowd of people going WAAAAAAAAHHH.
My feeling with this recording is not so much any sense of deficiency
in the playing for the most part, more a lack of daring when it came
to the recording. This is typically magnificent Hyperion production,
with keenly preserved instrumental colour and a fine sense of space
in the Potton Hall acoustic. Where the other recordings mentioned win
is in the sheer close-up and personal way the engineers have presented
the music. The ideal-seat concert hall experience is all very well,
but these are the kinds of sounds which to my mind demand perhaps a
few extra microphones, or their placement perhaps a few inches closer
to the players. This need not end up in an artificial sounding Hi-Fi
test disc scenario as the LaSalle recording proves. The sheer wallop
of Penderecki’s
String Quartet No. 1 is just missed here as
a result, though you can tell the players are not holding back. I fear
the Silesian Quartet’s Wergo
String Quartet No. 2 remains one
of my all-time horror recordings, and the Royal String Quartet left
me a bit high and dry by comparison. The Lutoslawski
String Quartet
is again well played, but the sheer personality and characterisation
in the LaSalle recording remains unbeaten.
Dominy Clements
