Beethoven als Lebensbegleiter scheint das Motto des ‘Quartetto di Cremona’ zu sein. Ergänzend zu den fulminanten und feurigen Aufnahmen der Streichquartette, spielen die italienischen Musiker den gesamten Zyklus wiederholt in Konzertreihen.

Fast hat man den Eindruck, dass die Beethovenschen Quartette zu einer Art Droge geworden sind, eine Musik, die die Cremoneser nicht mehr loslässt. Gerade diesen fesselnden Zustand übertragen sie auch auf ihre Zuhörer. Man sitzt gespannt vor der Stereo-Anlage und lässt sich von jeder Note, von jeder Artikulation, von jedem Zwischenton mitreißen.

Das galt für die bisherigen sechs CDs dieser großartigen Referenz-Einspielung, das gilt auch für die neueste Produktion mit den Quartetten op. 18/2 und op. 59/3. Dass diese Gesamteinspielung Referenzcharakter haben würde, war sehr früh abzusehen.

Es zeugt von höchster Musikalität, von höchstem musikalischen Einvernehmen, wenn man als Quartett über einen derart langen Zeitraum die gleiche Spannung, die gleiche Intensität, die gleiche Frische des Musizierens aufrechterhalten kann.

Auch diesmal steht ein frühes Werk einer reiferen Komposition gegenüber. Das Quartett in G-Dur klingt frisch, wie eine leichte Brise, kraftvoll, spritzig in den schnellen Sätzen, verinnerlicht im Adagio.

Das spätere, dritte ‘Rasumowski-Quartett’ ist in seiner Anlage reifer und kühner. Einmal mehr lässt sich das ‘Quartetto di Cremona’ von dieser Kühnheit Beethovens nicht einschüchtern. Es pariert sie mit forschem Impetus, intensiver Spannung und kammermusikalischer Virtuosität, wie sie selten zu hören ist.

Excitingly intense and deeply musical performances of Beethoven’s Quartets op. 18/2 and 59/3.

Eine andere Rezension gibt es hier:
https://www.pizzicato.lu/was-fur-ein-zyklus/

Die junge Sopranistin begeistert mit feiner Linienführung und attraktiven Koloraturen [...]

Forrester was the best of the best. These discs document this.

This site has praised previous issues in the series, and those high standards continue here [...] the engineers have captured a very realistic audio picture.

Finding Luzzato’s stylistic polar opposite isn’t easy but Wolfgang Schneiderhan comes pretty close. Best known for his dignified interpretations of Beethoven, Schneiderhan prioritised purity and clarity of argument above the purely sensual or virtuoso aspects of violin playing. A recent Audité CD gathers together three radio recordings from the Lucerne Festival, opening with a rather febrile and heavily etched 1952 account of Mozart’s Fifth Concerto under Paul Hindemith, Schneiderhan’s sound unpalatably shrill, with an unvaried though insistent vibrato and very little in the way of tonal colouring. Schneiderhan’s conceptually similar DG stereo version from 1968 (with the Berlin Philharmonic—recently reissued in DG’s ‘The Violin: 111 Legendary Recordings’) is marginally subtler than this older broadcast effort. Hans Werner Henze’s First Violin Concerto of 1947, a concise and eventful work that the violinist subsequently recorded commercially under the composer’s direction (again for DG), receives a far more lively and responsive performance, both in terms of the actual violin playing and Ferdinand Leitner’s vivid conducting. Best of all is the 1968 world premiere of Frank Martin’s 11-minute Magnificat where Schneiderhan partners his wife the soprano Irmgard Seefried under the sensitive direction of Bernard Haitink, a beautiful piece that was dedicated to the couple and was later integrated into Martin’s Maria-Tryptichon. Variable mono sound more than passes muster throughout.

Since its founding in 1997, Germany’s Mandelring Quartet has built a commendable discography mainly around the mainstream German Romantic string quartet repertoire, namely, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms. Significant detours from that established path, however, led the ensemble to a few off-road trips, as well as to a traversal of the complete Shostakovich quartets. Most, if not all, of the Mandelring’s releases have been reviewed in these pages, most of them favorably, and a number by me, including the group’s recordings of two of Brahms’s string quartets, plus a two-disc set of the composer’s chamber works featuring clarinet. Here the Mandelring turns its attention to Brahms’s two string quintets, featuring an additional viola.

Considering the composer we’re dealing with here, Brahms’s two string quintets are warm, genial, affable works, relatively free from the feelings of melancholy, loneliness, loss, and lashing out that characterize so much of his music. The scores are not free, however, from the contrapuntal, harmonic, and especially the rhythmic complexities that seem to have been hardwired into Brahms’s brain. Brahms was still a relatively young 49 when he composed the F-Major First Quintet in 1882 during a stay at one of his favorite vacationing spots, the spa town of Bad Ischl in upper Austria. The work opens with an expansive, relaxed theme that reflects the stress-free spring atmosphere of fresh air, sparkling water, and sunny skies that surrounded Brahms as he put pen to paper. He even wrote to his publisher, Simrock, “You have never before had such a beautiful work from me.” The Mandelring Quartet, joined by violist Roland Glassl, strikes just the right balance between the score’s seemingly uninhibited friendliness—almost as if Brahms has imbibed a bit too much and has become overly familiar with strangers in the pub—and its moments of contented repose. The players make the music glow, as it should.

When Brahms set to work on his G-Major Quintet eight years later in 1890, he intended it to be his valediction. At 57, he was financially secure, a world-famous composer, and a beloved friend and mentor to many. He was ready to retire and rest on his laurels. It wouldn’t have been a bad note to go out on, for the music is stunningly beautiful, but Fate had other plans for the composer and, fortuitously, for us. Brahms’s hope for a peaceful retirement was just that, a pipedream. Inspired by the playing of clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld, Brahms was soon back at his desk, composing his four clarinet masterpieces—the Clarinet Trio and Quintet, opp. 114 and 115, and the two Clarinet Sonatas, op. 120. But even those works weren’t his last words. His final musical utterances were the Four Serious Songs, op. 121, and the 11 Chorale Preludes for Organ, op. 122, both composed in 1896 in the year before his death.

Where the earlier string quintet projects feelings of well-being, good cheer, and general contentment, the later G-Major Quintet seems to take wing on soaring updrafts of rapture. From the very opening halo effect, produced by the two violas mirroring the two violins interlocked in a contrary motion, measured tremolo, we’re transported to a place of radiant light and otherworldly exultation. The feeling of elation and ecstasy, which seems barely containable and likely at any moment to escape the constraints of the printed page, is made viscerally manifest by the Mandelring’s players and Glassl. This may truly be the most transporting performance of Brahms’s G-Major Quintet I’ve ever heard.

Previous favorites in the two quintets, as coupled here, have been those by the Takács Quartet with Lawrence Power, the Alexander Quartet with Toby Appel, and the Nash Ensemble with Philip Dukes, this new version by the Mandelring and Glassl now supersedes all of them. This is not just fantastic playing, it’s revelatory music-making on the highest level.

It’s quite surprising, really, how few ensembles have taken up these two chamber works by Saint-Saëns. Currently there are fewer than half a dozen listings for each. In the case of the quintet, however, I don’t believe that any of them can be held up in comparison to this new recording of the work by the Quartetto di Cremona, for as you probably noticed in the above headnote, in addition to pianist Andrea Lucchesini joining the ensemble as the fifth member, double bassist Andrea Lumachi is a sixth participant. Admittedly, I did not know until I received this release that Saint-Saëns included an ad libitum part for double bass in the score’s third movement (Presto), thereby making the work, if only for one movement, a sextet.

Composed in 1855, the quintet is Saint-Saëns’s first attempt at a chamber work in any form, yet it already displays the composer’s complete confidence in writing for the medium and his recognizable stylistic fingerprints. The aforementioned Presto movement is a wild orage, with hairpin crescendos and diminuendos on single notes, the likes of which are familiar from the second movement of Shostakovich’s Piano Trio in E Minor, which wouldn’t be written for another 89 years. I’ve compared this new performance to the one by the Nash Ensemble on Hyperion which does not include the double bass, and I can report that including it, as the Quartetto di Cremona does here, really makes a difference. It turns the movement from a Category 3 hurricane into at least a Category 4. Batten down the hatches and take cover for this one!

Whatever the reason—perhaps it was awe of Beethoven—Saint-Saëns did not attempt to compose a string quartet until 1899, when he was 64 and already older than Beethoven when the latter died; and Saint-Saëns would only approach the genre once more, in 1918 at the age of 83, three years before his own death. The awe of Beethoven might not be a far-fetched theory, for between 1858 and 1859, Saint-Saëns made a study of Beethoven’s string quartets, transcribing movements from three of them for piano: the Adagio from op. 18/6, the scherzo from op. 59/1, and the finale from op. 59/3. He knew what he was up against.

I’ve had over five years to repent my sin of describing Saint-Saëns’s E-Minor String Quartet as “a tornado in a thimble,” when I reviewed a recording of it by the Fine Arts Quartet in 35:1. I’ve tried in that time to find the work’s redeeming qualities, but my sense of it is that in writing the piece Saint-Saëns was not true to himself and to his innate musical instincts. He took himself and the medium too seriously, as if, somehow, composing a string quartet meant having to assume the mantle of Beethoven. Daniel Morrison took exception to my assessment of Saint-Saens’s quartet in a 37:1 review of the Modigliani Quartet’s recording of the work, referring to an earlier review in 21:6 by Robert McColley who felt the quartet possessed the “subtlety and complexity of musical and spiritual depth … perhaps as close to the masterworks of late Beethoven as anything written since.”

But that’s precisely my point. I keep coming back to Ned Rorem’s apothegm that “everything German is superficially profound; everything French is profoundly superficial.” It may sound simplistic and even politically incorrect, but it contains a kernel of truth, as apothegms usually do. Saint-Saëns was at his best when he was superficial, and I don’t mean that in a disparaging way. The best aspects of his music are in its surfaces, in the intuitive naturalness of its melodies and harmonies that never feel forced or “composed.” We admire the spontaneity and effortlessness of the music’s beauty for its own sake. It doesn’t demand of us that we look for subtlety, complexity, or spiritual depth. In composing his first string quartet, Saint-Saëns seems to have felt the need to seek those things to be worthy of contributing to Beethoven’s great legacy. To my ear, the result is a work that doesn’t really sound like Saint-Saëns, any more than another quartet in the same key sounds like its composer, Verdi. Sometimes I make terse statements in reviews—like Saint-Saëns’s E-Minor String Quartet being “a tornado in a thimble,” without expounding on the reasoning by which I arrived at my conclusion. I hope the foregoing at least explains my thinking, even if you don’t agree with it.

All of that aside, the performances here of both the quartet and the quintet by the Quartetto di Cremona, joined in the latter by Andrea Lucchesini and Andrea Lumachi, are thrilling. The players are on fire, delivering some of the most electrifying and exhilarating chamber music-making I’ve heard. And I will conclude by saying that they make even this listener re-evaluate his opinion of Saint-Saëns’s E-Minor String Quartet, though I still maintain that it sounds more like Beethoven than it does Saint-Saëns. And speaking of Beethoven, I see that in 37:1 and again in 37:5, I could barely contain my enthusiasm for the Quartetto di Cremona’s Volumes 1 and 2 of a new Beethoven quartet cycle. I see from the ensemble’s web site that the cycle is complete on six volumes, but I don’t believe we have received any of them beyond the first two. Someone, please send them posthaste.

Anyway, this Saint-Saëns release is going on my 2017 Want List; it’s that good. Urgently recommended.

Sendebeleg siehe PDF!

Das Ensemble ‘arcimboldo’ aus Basel, 1991 von Thilo Hirsch gegründet, ist ein Continuo-Ensemble mit Viola da gamba/Violone, Orgel/Cembalo und Chitarrone/Laute. Diese Besetzung wird je nach Anforderung um andere Continuo- und Melodieinstrumente sowie menschliche Stimmen erweitert. Ihre neueste CD ist eine Hommage an die ‘Bogenhauser Künstlerkapelle’ (1899-1939), die längst vor der ‘Early Music’-Welle auf historischen Instrumenten spielte. Die CD ist ein Abbild des Repertoires der Kapelle, mit Musik aus Bayern, genauso wie Werken aus Renaissance, Barock, Klassik und Romantik. So stehen z.B. Chopins ‘Trauermarsch’ und Menuette von Mozart und Bizet neben Bachs ‘Actus Tragicus’, Kompositionen von Rameau, Corelli und Arcadelt neben folkloristischen Tänzen und Frank Wedekinds ‘Tantenmörder’, alles in Originalbesetzung und auf hohem musikalischem Niveau. Ein apartes Programm für Liebhaber (Audite 97.730).

Von Routine ist hier rein gar nichts zu spüren. Die Sextette sprühen nur so vor Leidenschaft, Dramatik und Energie.