SIBELIUS: String Quartet “Intimate Voices”; SCHOENBERG: String Quartet, Op. 7 – Tetzlaff Quartet – Avi-Service for Music 8553202, 75:31 [Distr. by Allegro]
****:
The two quartets on this album, by Jan Sibelius (1865-1957) and Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), were written almost at exactly the same time, and in the same key (D minor). Both composers linked the late Romantic 19th century with the modern 20th Century.
Sibelius is the best known Scandinavian composer. Known for creating an orchestral sound that expressed his Northern landscape, he used nationalistic themes, and Finnish legends that roused his countrymen in the face of Tsarist Russian threats. Seven symphonies and many tone poems were his major compositional structures. The String Quartet in D minor “Intimate Voices” was the only significant work in that form. Its name comes from the third movement, Adagio di molto, when Sibelius wrote “Voces Intimae” next to three E minor chords that are played pianissimo. It’s meditative and exciting. Themes are developed from cells that he created for his Third and Fourth Symphonies. Notable are the tremolos of the scherzo, (a device Sibelius uses often) and the central adagio, which is exquisitely beautiful and intimate. Yet, there’s a Nordic darkness that runs underneath the surface. The Tetzlaff Quartet performs it with passion and a peaceful vulnerability. It emerges as a personal, profound and uniquely quiet expression of this great composer.
Schoenberg was a major force in the transition from tonality to atonality and beyond in the 20th Century. When his String Quartet in D minor, Op. 7, was premiered by the Rose Quartet in 1907, it received mixed reviews. Gustav Mahler was there and was observed arguing its merits with someone. It reminds me of his late romantic masterpiece, Transfigured Night. The refined rhythms, polyphonic lines, dense contrapuntal textures and nuanced harmonies of this one movement, 45-minute work, emerge as an evolving series of different parts. Inserted in its sonata form is a scherzo, rondo and a slow section. The central melody has a typical post-Romantic ‘yearning’ quality and it undergoes many mood variations. There are moments of quiet, questioning repose; sections of humor in the scherzo; and instances of frenetic chaos. The eerie stillness of the beautiful adagio is punctuated by string tremolos. A dramatic and exciting finale ends quietly. This was the first work that the Tetzlaff Quartet learned when they started playing in 1994 and they express every mood with complete mastery.
The sound on this disc is close and detailed. This is an opportunity to get to know two seldom heard quartets by two twentieth century masters.
— Robert Moon
