Jurgis KARNAVIČIUS (1884-1941)
String Quartet No 1 in G Minor, Op 1 (1913) [34:46]
String Quartet No 2 in D Minor, Op 6 (1917) [41:37]
Vilnius String Quartet
rec. May 2020, Lithuanian National Philharmonic
ONDINE ODE1351-2 [76:25]
Though he is a major foundational figure in Lithuanian music there is very little to be heard on disc by Jurgis Karnavičius. Clearly Ondine has now embarked on a rescue operation for the four quartets, the first two of which can be heard played here by the Vilnius String Quartet: appropriately so as this was the city in which the composer grew up, though he had been born in Kaunas. In 1933 Karnavičius wrote Gražina the first Lithuanian opera of the independence years and one of the principal reasons why he remains so admired in his native country. His studies, though, had been in St Petersburg where his teachers numbered the great and the good – Lyadov, Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov and Maximilian Steinberg among them. He was soon to become a professor at the Conservatory but was mobilized into the Russian army in 1914 and captured the following year, spending the rest of the war in a prison camp near Vienna.
The First Quartet comes from 1913 when, at the age of 29, he graduated from St Petersburg Conservatory. It’s a clear-cut sonata form work with attractive themes. The highlights are probably the bubbly Scherzo, full of elegance and charming esprit. The slow movement flows youthfully without plumbing depths, though it sports attractive contrasts of mood and feeling. The happy ebullience of the finale, with its meditative B section, is visited, briefly, by the dreaded fugal finale, which fortunately isn’t too protracted. The overriding feeling her is one of charm and high spirits.
If the First Quartet is still very much a product of his student days, conventionally structured, with pleasing development and themes but not too much true individuality, the Second shows a significant increase in harmonic complexity. It was written during his wartime incarceration and at some intervening point he seems to have discovered Debussy. The writing is more subtle and piquant than the 1913 Quartet and there is an increase in metrical freedom too, not least in the Allegretto. There is an increase, as well, in expressive depth in the slow movement – not surprisingly given the circumstances – where songful lyricism is appealing and rises to a peak of tension. That said, this can be traced to, say, Glazunov whose quartets must have been known to Karnavičius. Glazunov’s quartets are much more expressively ardent than his erstwhile student’s but there is a definable thread from, say, Glazunov’s Third Quartet to Karnavičius’s Second.
I’m indebted to the fine notes by Beata Baublinskienė for biographical matters and we are all the beneficiaries of the finely recorded performances – refined, elegant, passionate when required – of the Vilnius String Quartet. These are première recordings too.
Jonathan Woolf
Previous review: Rob Barnett
