LUIGI CHERUBINI: Complete String Quartets – Quartetto Savino – Stradivarius STR33800 (3 CDs), 155:40. ****½ [Distr. by Allegro]:
When I was in Paris, I visited the Père Lachaise Cemetery. The grave of Chopin was festooned with flowers and it wasn’t even his birthday. The attendant told me that the site was never without flowers, usually bouquets and long-stemmed roses placed there by lovers.
Four meters away I saw the grave of his friend Luigi Cherubini–flowerless.
While his life wasn’t tumultuous as Chopin’s, he was well known and respected in the 19th Century at least. And this excellent collection of string quartets gives an indication why. A contemporary of both Beethoven and Mozart (outliving them both), Cherubini was primarily an opera composer. There is something cantabile about the Lento movement of his Quartet No. 2 that swirls amid currents of tragedy and forbearance. Even his weaker quartets, like the floundering Quartet No. 2, have originally-structured themes. Don’t look for a tuneful Brahms or a facile Mendelssohn, however. Cherubini’s melodies, while engaging, don’t always fixate in the memory. Some of them float about like balloons at a Florentine street fair. He is more of a creator of musical spectacle, a blacksmith of dramatic effects. The placid Adagio of Quartet No. 1 develops its edge in less than two minutes, then suddenly explodes into a whirling Allegro. Throughout the quartets, the listener is startled by his frissons of musical surprise and by his rococo finales. The writer Wilhelm Altmann claimed that Cherubini’s six string quartets are first rate and, in particular, thought No. 1 and No. 3 were masterworks. But did Cherubini? Half of these works are posthumous, which may mean he didn’t think that much of them to push for publication. Too bad. While not tragic like Beethoven’s last quartets, celebratory like Dvorak’s, or humorous like Haydn’s, there’s enough garlicky invention in them to sustain a recital or two. Here’s hoping this first release of his complete quartets leads to wider recognition of their quirky power.
While still in Paris, I couldn’t resist. The next day I returned to the Père Lachaise Cemetery and placed a red carnation on the grave of Luigi Cherubini.
— Peter Bates
