DVORAK: String Quartet No. 13 in G Major, Op. 106; Andante appassionato; COLERIDGE-TAYLOR: 5 Fantasiestücke, Op. 5 – Takacs Quartet – Hyperion CDA68413 (4/18/23) (63:53) [Distr. by PIAS] *****:
Recorded 19-21 August 2022, this program brings together a pair of kindred spirits from divergent cultures, the British-African composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1942) and Bohemian master Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904), both of whose professional success was beholden to an admiring London public. For although Dvorak’s visits to Britain were interrupted by an invitation to direct the National Conservatory of Music in New York City in 1891, it was his 1885 visit to London that garnered the interest of the Novello publishing house that bolstered his international repute and his fees from his usual publisher, Simrock. Coleridge-Taylor, raised in Croydon, came to the attention of the Royal College of Music as a violin student who would enter the composition class of Charles Villiers Stanford. His oratorio Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast became a rival to Handel’s Messiah in popularity, even before his frequent visits to the United States sparked his fascination with American Negro cultural life. In 1910, while leading New York musicians on his Choral ballads, the ensemble members dubbed him “the African Mahler.”
Coleridge-Taylor’s Fantasy Pieces or Fantasiestücke (after Schumann) for string quartet were composed in 1895, while the composer was yet a student at the Royal College of Music. They comprise five character pieces of varying moods. The opening Prelude feels restless and agitated. The second movement, Serenade, follows the Tchaikovsky Pathetique Symphony, opting for the unusual 5/4 metric for its lyrical expressiveness. The third movement, Humoresque: Presto, seems a direct allusion to Dvorak, even as its driven impulse resembles many a Dvorak scherzo or furiant. In ternary form, like its successor, the Minuet and Trio, the scherzo feels Bohemian, while the fourth movement looks back to antiquated, courtly elegance. Coleridge-Taylor, like Dvorak, has a penchant – again akin to Schumann – for cyclic construction, so his finale Dance: Vivace resuscitates impulses we heard in the Prelude. A drone from Andras Fejer’s cello sets the music in scurrying motion in the same E Minor as Dvorak’s New World Symphony.
Dvorak composed his String Quartet No. 13 in G Major in 1895, quite soon after his return to Bohemia from the United States. Dvorak’s structural process has become more intricate than that evidenced in his popular American Quartet in F, allotting to each of the first four measures of the Allegro moderato a different motif that soon converge into one solid, risoluto theme. The secondary subject, elegantly intoned by the Takacs players, moves in triplets, and the development becomes episodic and fragmented, in the style of Beethoven. A third theme appears that the viola (Richard O’Neill) will intone beneath the accompanying twin violins. The second violin (Harumi Rhodes) bears the role of ushering in the recapitulation with a new countersubject to the main tune.
The innate warmth of the ensemble Takacs Quartet infiltrates the tenor of the melancholy Adagio ma non troppo in E-flat Major. Two themes emerge, in major and minor, that Dvorak will evolve as a double theme and variations set in 3/8, a form embraced often by Haydn and by Beethoven in his Ninth Symphony third movement. The climactic moment occurs in C Major, an illumination modeled by Smetana in his First Quartet “From My Life.” Dvorak plunges the Slavic depths of his soul here, with the cello’s intoning a lament of searing power, reinforced by first violin Edward Dusinberre’s high tessitura and extended cantilena. The third movement in B Minor, Molto vivace, offers a truly Slavic impulse, shaped more like a rondo with two episodes – in a pentatonic A-flat and hunting-horn D Major – resembles the form favored by Schumann for his similar movements. The Takacs performs this music with a brisk, hustling verve, the accents both piercing and lilted
A brief Andante introduces the theme of the final Allegro con fuoco, and this slow section reappears in expanded guise. Dvorak employs powerful, contrapuntal devices as well as a potent sense of declamation to advance his ideas, having moved from a martial 4/4 to an agitated 2/4 that gains a forceful impetus. Each member of the ensemble contributes to the lyrical mix that often catapults us forward. The fabric ineluctably embraces prior motifs from the first movement, its third theme, as well as drone effects and arpeggios of Quartet’s beginning. We have come to realize just how virtuosic Dvorak’s concept has become, if only by virtue of the panoply of colored impulses that saturate our collective experience. Typical of Dvorak’s late works, symphonic and chamber music, he proceeds to a kind of narrative, an “and so my children” sensibility, that embraces the whole of the composition while rollicking in the sheer ecstasy of original creation.
Takacs adds an early invention of Dvorak, his discarded 1873 Andante appassionato in A Minor, revived as late as 1982 for publication. Originally, the music meant to serve the composer’s String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 12. Dvorak left the manuscript incomplete, so the Takacs people round off the latter section, now descended a semitone to G and then to G-flat, with a reprise of the initial Andante. We have a restored six minutes, well spent, that completes a recording highly recommended.
—Gary Lemco
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