Coleridge-Taylor and Dvorak: Music for String Quartet
Takacs Quartet (Hyperion)
Hyperion has for decades been one of the most respected labels in classical music. But we’ve never been able to include it in this monthly column because its albums have not been available to stream — until now. After being acquired by Universal earlier this year, the company began putting past and fresh titles on Spotify and other platforms at the end of July.
That includes this new recording from the Takacs Quartet, whose meaty yet supple sound is well suited to a pairing of works from 1895: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s set of five “Fantasiestücke” and Dvorak’s Quartet in G (Op. 106), with an earlier Dvorak Andante movement as a sweet coda. While the group’s tone isn’t overly mellow or smoothed, this is a distinctly rich, sunset-afterglow take on late Romanticism. (Compare it, for example, to the Catalyst Quartet’s lighter-grain, also satisfying Coleridge-Taylor from a couple of years ago.)
Most memorable is the spiderlike, even eerie wispiness that the Takacs achieves in muted passages; the players take contrasts of textures seriously, without either gauziness or robustness seeming exaggerated. The ensemble phrases gracefully, and nothing here ever feels glib: In the third movement of the Dvorak, as in Coleridge-Taylor’s “Humoresque,” danciness is aligned with fierce darkness more than playfulness. ZACHARY WOOLFE
Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5; Schulhoff, Five Pieces
Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra; Manfred Honeck, conductor (Reference Recordings)
Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony matters to Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Honeck chose the work for his first concert with the ensemble in 2006, an appearance that led to his appointment as its music director, and to the extraordinary partnership that they have enjoyed since. That performance was recorded live, and, in its sweep and power, remains highly convincing.
Yet this new account is of another stature, as if Honeck’s earlier interpretation were a first draft, and this the finished masterpiece — and make no mistake, it is a masterpiece, a dark psychological thriller that soars and scars and ends up being rather unnerving. Drawing on Tchaikovsky’s sketches and personal biography, Honeck writes in the album’s booklet that the work is in some respects a portrayal of depression. But he offers neither a cold, clinical analysis of the score nor the complacent, simplistic narrative of triumph over disaster that so many of his colleagues are content to find in it. Securing orchestral playing of unrelenting intensity and utmost exactitude, Honeck instead gives the symphony all the harrowing drama — the dread, the instability, the vertiginous sense of being on the edge — of a mental breakdown.
It is not easy to listen to at times, and there is scant resolution at the close. But this Fifth, one of the greatest ever recorded, does make one conclusion inescapable, though it is more of a confirmation by now: There has not been a conductor like Honeck in a long time. DAVID ALLEN
‘Perfect Offering’
Explore Ensemble (Huddersfield Contemporary)
It’s easy, when writing about albums that boast spatial audio, to spend too much time discussing mixes and formats. So I’ll praise the music here first.
Cassandra Miller’s calm and bell-like opening piece — which gives the album its title — could fall into a state of interpretive stasis, given its droning beginnings and austerely beautiful consonance. But the Explore Ensemble players are alert to the rhythmic contours that keep things active, as when a stern piano exclamation leads to subtle forms of locomotion.
These instrumentalists also revel in the details of Lawrence Dunn’s “Suite.” At the outset, gloomy harmonies are paired with a field recording of “a pier being demolished” — but there’s also some quietly strange piano writing. After the piece progresses through other field recordings, including one of children singing, it winds up in a sour-but-exultant field of contrasting tunings. Keeping the work from feeling too formally unwieldy is a coda, incorporating piano, that seems to riff on the instrument’s earlier material, even as it presses forward with a fresh energy.
Two other meditative works, by Lisa Illean and Rebecca Saunders, fare well on the album’s spatial Dolby Atmos mix, available on Apple Music and Tidal. But the Explore Ensemble’s artistic director, Nicholas Moroz, has written critically about “tech-dependent” spatial audio mixes, and has also provided a binaural mix of Saunders’s closing piece on all platforms, and in paid downloads. Because her “Murmurs” was written for players surrounding an audience, this immersive mix is a particular gift for listeners at home. SETH COLTER WALLS
‘Divergent Paths’
Telegraph Quartet (Azica Records)
A mere three years separate the first performances of the Ravel String Quartet (1904) and Schoenberg’s First String Quartet (1907). But the stylistic gap between them is immense: the Ravel an essay in restraint and lyrical charm, without a single wasted note, and the Schoenberg a single-movement colossus whose every musical idea is exhaustively worked and reworked, nearly bursting the limits of tonality along the way.
Small wonder, then, that these Janus-faced works seem rarely to show up in each other’s company in concert programs or on recordings, or that this Telegraph Quartet’s album of them is called “Divergent Paths.” But by yoking them together, the Bay Area-based group reminds us just how wildly inventive this moment in the history of European music was — how expansive were its possibilities.
Emphasizing the historical point, however, should not obscure the straightforward musical values of “Divergent Paths.” The world may not be in compelling need of another recording of the Ravel, though the Telegraph’s is full of elegance and pinpoint control. But in the Schoenberg, they achieve something truly special, meticulously guiding its often wayward progress. At times Schoenberg makes the four strings sound almost orchestral, but the Telegraph players can also make his contrapuntal tangles radiantly clear. Every minute of their account sounds gripping and purposeful, which is one of the highest compliments you can pay the piece. DAVID WEININGER
Liszt: ‘Transcendental Études’
Yunchan Lim, piano (Steinway & Sons)
Could it be that Yunchan Lim’s famous performance of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition last year was somehow not his most impressive work there? That that account, which so moved its conductor Marin Alsop that she wiped away a tear as she put her baton down, was not, by some freakish accident of musical history, the summit of the South Korean teenager’s early achievements?
It may well be. Watch the Rachmaninoff today, like the 12 million viewers who have marveled at it on YouTube already, and it remains undeniably impressive, eloquent and virtuosic and much else besides. But this Liszt performance, from the competition’s semifinal round, which can also be seen online, is stupefying.
Gawp as Lim’s tremolos flutter then thunder in his “Chasse-neige,” and wonder how he gives each of them such poetic meaning. Tremble as he stomps his way through “Mazeppa,” then forgive yourself for swooning so readily at the twilight magic of his “Harmonies du soir.” Yes, Lim is rough on his Steinway, and no, not every bar of every étude works out. But when he can play “Feux follets” like the devil, it’s hard really to care. DAVID ALLEN
