MusicWeb International One of the most grown-up review sites around 2024
60,000 reviews
... and still writing ...

Search MusicWeb Here Acte Prealable Polish CDs
 

Presto Music CD retailer
 
Founder: Len Mullenger                                    Editor in Chief:John Quinn             

Some items
to consider

new MWI
Current reviews

old MWI
pre-2023 reviews

paid for
advertisements

Acte Prealable Polish recordings

Forgotten Recordings
Forgotten Recordings
All Forgotten Records Reviews

TROUBADISC
Troubadisc Weinberg- TROCD01450

All Troubadisc reviews


FOGHORN Classics

Alexandra-Quartet
Brahms String Quartets

All Foghorn Reviews


All HDTT reviews


Songs to Harp from
the Old and New World


all Nimbus reviews



all tudor reviews


Follow us on Twitter


Editorial Board
MusicWeb International
Founding Editor
   
Rob Barnett
Editor in Chief
John Quinn
Contributing Editor
Ralph Moore
Webmaster
   David Barker
Postmaster
Jonathan Woolf
MusicWeb Founder
   Len Mullenger


Support us financially by purchasing this from

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

 

 



Advertising on
Musicweb


Donate and keep us afloat

 

New Releases

Naxos Classical
All Naxos reviews

Hyperion recordings
All Hyperion reviews

Foghorn recordings
All Foghorn reviews

Troubadisc recordings
All Troubadisc reviews



all Bridge reviews


all cpo reviews

Divine Art recordings
Click to see New Releases
Get 10% off using code musicweb10
All Divine Art reviews


All Eloquence reviews

Lyrita recordings
All Lyrita Reviews

 

Wyastone New Releases
Obtain 10% discount

Subscribe to our free weekly review listing