Mal angenommen, wir stellen uns Franz Schubert mit einer Eistüte in der Hand...

Mal angenommen, wir stellen uns Franz Schubert mit einer Eistüte in der Hand...

[...] Weich fließende Farben werden hier gleichsam aus den Tasten massiert,...

[...] Weich fließende Farben werden hier gleichsam aus den Tasten massiert,...

In einem Gemeinschaftsprojekt zwischen dem Label "audite" und Deutschlandradio Kultur werden seit Jahren einmalige Aufnahmen aus den RIAS-Archiven auf CD herausgebracht. Inzwischen sind bereits 40 CD's erschienen mit Aufnahmen von Furtwängler und Fricsay, von Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau u. v. a.

Die jüngste Produktion dieser Reihe "The Early RIAS-Recordings" enthält bisher unveröffentlichte Aufnahmen von Friedrich Gulda, die zwischen 1950 und 1959 entstanden. Die Einspielungen von Beethoven, Debussy, Ravel und Chopin zeigen den jungen Pianisten an der Schwelle zu internationalem Ruhm.


Die Meinung unserer Musikkritiker:

Eine repräsentative Auswahl bisher unveröffentlichter Aufnahmen, die aber bereits alle Namen enthält, die für Guldas späteres Repertoire bedeutend werden sollten: Mozart, Beethoven, Debussy, Ravel, Chopin. Herausragend insbesondere seine Interpretationen von Werken Beethovens. In dessen später A-Dur-Sonate op. 101 erleben wir den Jungstar als kühnen Stürmer und Dränger, der seine spätere Rolle als kompromissloser Musik-Rebell zwar noch nicht gefunden hat, dessen heftiges "Renitenz-Potential" hier aber bereits deutlich anklingt.
(Wilfried Bestehorn)

In diesen frühen Tondokumenten aus den 50er Jahren ist Guldas typisches intensives, rhythmisch-geschärftes Spiel bereits voll entwickelt. Vor allem in Chopins Préludes op. 28 und Debussys "Suite Bergamasque" wird deutlich: alles atmet, alles fließt, alles entwickelt sich logisch aus dem Notentext heraus: erstaunlich bei einem kaum 20-jährigen Pianisten, erstaunlich auch, dass diese Aufnahmen nach knapp 60 Jahren nichts von ihrer Frische eingebüßt haben.

„Bis ins letzte ausgeschliffen, jedoch etwas zu sehr mit unpersönlicher,...

„Bis ins letzte ausgeschliffen, jedoch etwas zu sehr mit unpersönlicher,...

In the disjointed Portrait DVD that comes as a bonus with this CD (the second instalment of a new Shostakovich cycle), members of the Mandelring Quartet make two surprising comments. Nanette Schmidt tells us that all four of us are powerful people; her brother Bernhard warns us that a quartet¹s interpretations suffer when there¹s too much agreement among the players. The comments are surprising not because they seem inappropriate to Shostakovich’s idiom (on the contrary, his quartets work best when played by four strong-willed players who can contest one another), but rather because if there’s anything missing from these fluent and intelligent performances, it’s precisely power and diversity.

Indeed, like everything I’ve heard from this foursome, these readings reveal an emotional reticence backed by a remarkable uniformity of tone and vision, most obviously audible in exceptional balances (note how vividly they present the fugal writing in development of the Third Quartet’s first movement), in a seamless coherence whenever material is passed from one instrument to another, and in an unfaltering accord about the way each detail contributes to the music’s emotional trajectory. In terms of dynamic control and tonal nuance, this is surely one of the most refined quartets of its generation; and in those flickering moments of untroubled lyricism (more frequent in the Sixth Quartet than in the Third or Eighth) and in the haunting morendo endings that round out each of these works, their performances stand up to any.

Their finesse, however, is apt to cushion Shostakovich’s violent jolts (say, the stark hammer blows in the third movement of the Third or the fourth movement of the Eighth) and to mitigate the music’s vein of desolation (surely, the first violin’s laments in the fourth movement of the Third need to be bleaker). For all the beauty of the performances, then, the music’s emotional reach seems both distorted and constricted. The Mandelring certainly don¹t convey the sense of unrelenting grief in the Sixth’s third-movement passacaglia, for instance, and they substitute consolation for despair in the finale to the Eighth. The music¹s variety of utterance is muted, too: long-range changes in mood are generally well handled (note how steadily they build to the climax of the fourth movement of the Sixth), but quicker shifts in spirit are often underplayed.

In the end, then, these are comfortable readings that offer a very partial view of the repertoire. I much prefer the more extroverted, hyperbolic style that marks the Kopelman Quartet’s Third or the more rugged approach that the Borodin Quartet take to all three of these quartets. If you favour your Shostakovich on the sweeter side, however, you may well find the Mandelring appealing, especially given the first-rate engineering and the generally informative notes.

The Mandelring Quartett are named for a street in Neustadt an der Weinstrasse on which three of its four members lived. This is not surprising, though, as the three Schmidts are siblings. Violist Roland Glassl joined them in 1999, but the Mandelring (with a different violist, of course) have been playing for longer, winning their first major award in 1991. With this release they are halfway through a Shostakovich cycle. I missed the first two volumes (the second of which was reviewed in October 2007), but I am so impressed by this third that I might now purchase its predecessors. The prose on the back of the jewel-case verges on purple. In these three quartets, we read, Shostakovich not only interpreted the achievements of his great role-model Beethoven into contemporary musical language, he also paid tribute to the three important women in his life: his late wife Nina [in No. 7], his last wife Irina [No. 9] and his secret love Galina Ustvolskaya [No. 5]. Michael Struck-Schloen’s actual booklet notes are more temperate, although they have not always been translated into idiomatic English. These three quartets span 1952 to 1964. (As a frame of reference, Symphonies Nos. 10-13 came in between.) Struck-Schloen aptly compares the Fifth Quartet in its compelling constructivism and dramatic form to the middle Beethoven quartets. It is in this quartet that Shostakovich quotes Ustvolskaya’s Clarinet Trio. The Seventh Quartet is construed as a work of grief ¬ but with Shostakovich, that is hardly a unique distinction, and it has too much violence to be simply elegiac. Similar to what he would later say about the Fifteenth Symphony, Shostakovich at one point referred to the Ninth Quartet as a children’s piece (about toys and excursions). As with the symphony, this description smells like a red herring. Interestingly, both works evoke the finale of Rossini’s William Tell Overture: the symphony quotes it explicitly, and the quartet dances around it, via its obsessive anapaestic rhythms. It’s impossible not to compare the Mandelring with the Hagen, another three-sibling group. The Hagen play the Seventh Quartet with a fuller tone and give the lower strings more prominence, although it is not easy to rule out the role of the engineering. The Mandelring play this music more edgily; both groups rough up the tone when it seems appropriate to do so, however. Interpretatively, the Hagen and the Mandelring are very similar ¬ implacable, passionate and haunting ¬ and their tempos are almost identical. DG’s engineers bring the Hagen closer to the listener than Audite’s do for the Mandelring. The Audite disc is an SACD, but I played it on a conventional CD player, so that needs to be taken into consideration. The Fitzwilliam Quartet were once everyone’s favourite Western interpreters of the quartets, but I confess that my enthusiasm for their recordings has waned with so many fine new ones appearing in the digital era, present company included. I wish the Hagen Quartet would record a complete Shostakovich cycle, but the Mandelring Quartett seem poised to console that particular disappointment of mine.

Con este volumen se completan los nueve primeros cuartetos de Shostakovich. Como...