WE’RE HEARING an increasing death-knell for big box sets, so I’m thrilled to welcome the reissue of all of the Guarneri Quartet’s RCA Red Seal recordings in a 49-CD set from Sony Classical (current owner of the RCA catalogue). The recordings run from 1965 to 1986, with a singular jump ahead to 2005. The quartet changed labels in the mid-‘80s, recording for Philips and Arabesque (much of the time re-recording works initially waxed for RCA). But this set is an excellent starting place for getting to know the core quartet repertory – and also a benchmark collection of those recordings. Performances don’t get much better than this.
What’s not here are the likes of Barber and Ives, no Lutosławski or Berio, and certainly nothing Second Viennese. Which is not to say those weren’t in the Guarneri repertory: works by many of those composers were performed in concert, but I suspect that nervous RCA execs discouraged them from recording the more modern stuff. Even their wonderful disc of Tchaikovsky’s “Souvenir de Florence” sextet was dropped from the catalogue for lack of sales mere months after it appeared in late 1966. (It was reissued a decade later, after the ensemble had achieved superstar status).
The omission of any Shostakovich and both Prokofiev quartets seems a little surprising, but I posed the Prokofiev question in a letter to Arnold Steinhardt back in 1981. “We do not play them out of mixed feelings for his work,” he replied. “The craft is always there, but his great gift for orchestral colors elevates the symphonies, concerti, ballet scores to a high level. The quartets are good (I like the first especially), but I miss the inspired detail of, say, the first violin concerto (one of my favorites).” And Steinhardt has noted elsewhere that they would look at a Shostakovich quartet from time to time but never could achieve the unanimous approval the group required.
You will find quartets here by Dohnányi, Kodály, Verdi, and Grieg, but you’ll have to go to their Philips recordings to find Janáček, Arriaga, Sibelius, and Henze. But everything you do find in the RCA set is a treasure, a benchmark, again, of how the piece should sound – and, most importantly – how it should make you feel. And that ties in with the Guarneri approach. They don’t so much embrace a piece as attack it. Without savagery, I hasten to add: with enthusiasm, as if lovingly tearing into a birthday present. All four members had achieved soloist status before forming the group, and with it the unique personalities that sustain a soloist. Rather than aim for the homogeneity of sound that characterized many other quartets, they followed the lead of the Budapest Quartet and let those varied personalities thrive.
That Tchaikovsky recording, their third issued LP, was also a tribute to the Budapest, members of which earlier had helped usher the fledgling quartet to life. Violist Boris Kroyt and cellist Mischa Schneider, both members of that group, completed the recording’s personnel. It was Mischa’s younger brother, Alexander (Sasha, also a Budapest Quartet member), who particularly encouraged Steinhardt and fellow Marlboro Music School students John Dalley (violin), Michael Tree (viola), and David Soyer (cello) to formalize their chamber-music playing into a professional quartet.
It was Kroyt who suggested the name Guarneri, in acknowledgment of a similarly named ensemble with which he had played decades earlier. The young foursome began rehearsing as a quartet in 1964, launching themselves with a concert that July in Massachusetts and in Manhattan the following February. That appearance won them a recording contract with RCA, and they debuted on vinyl with the release in early 1966 of quartets by Smetana (his first, complete with the piercing high-E near its finish that signified the composer’s traumatic hearing problem), Dvořák (his 14th), and Mozart (his 22nd and 23rd, from the set of three dubbed “Prussian,” honoring their dedicatee, King Friedrich Wilhelm II. They would record the remaining one, no. 21, seven years later).
Those initial recordings betray no lack of accomplishment, and the Dvořák especially proves that these musicians bear romantic, confessional souls. They would record three more Dvořák quartets, including the “American” (no. 12), the last-named released on a record with Dvořák’s “American” String Quintet (no. 3, with violist Walter Trampler), the lively Terzetto, and one each of Dvořák’s Piano Quartets and Piano Quintets.
Almost all of the with-piano pieces in this collection were recorded with Arthur Rubinstein, who heard one of the Guarneri’s earliest recordings and insisted on working with them – a hell of a tribute from world-famous 79-year-old, joining them on their fifth release, the Piano Quintet by Brahms. And it didn’t stop there: over the next five years, the pianist joined with them on all three of Brahms’s Piano Quartets, the Quintet by Schumann, both Piano Quartets by Mozart, the Fauré Piano Quartet and the aforementioned Dvořák works. No other chamber ensemble enjoyed as much recorded collaboration with Rubinstein. And the only other pianist represented in this set is Emanuel Ax, on a 1983 recording of Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet.
Listen to the opening of Dvořák’s Piano Quintet No. in A, Op. 81. Rubinstein lays down an accompanying figure for Soyer’s richly sung opening theme, echoed moments later by Steinhardt but with, I think, a different purpose. The cello was making an entreaty to which the violin (as the part is written) wasn’t prepared to fully respond. Such is romance. It’s a tribute to collaborative style that Rubinstein eagerly embraced.
They attracted a considerable following right off the bat, and their performance schedule grew intense. If their recording schedule wasn’t as intense as their touring, it may have been the somewhat tougher sell of chamber music to the classical music-buying public at large, which welcomed the Beethoven quartets while cold-shouldering (at first) Tchaikovsky’s sextet.
You have ten Mozart quartets in this collection, among them the six dedicated to Haydn and those three for the King of Prussia. All six of Mozart’s Viola Quintets were recorded live during a series of concerts in 1984 and 1985 at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, bringing in as guest violist Kim Kashkashian, Steven Tenenbom, or Iva Kavafian. They even recorded the original quartet-and-double bass version of “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” with Julius Levine.
If you can make out the detailed program notes by Halsey Stevens, reproduced in miniature within the two-CD gatefold, your journey through the six Bartók quartets will be much easier. Well; not easier, perhaps, but you’ll at least have a flashlight through those tunnels. They are monumental works, given, as usual, definitive performances here – and so what if you have to absorb that extra information to follow them? There’s no aspect of the classical-music wherein you won’t benefit from education; it’s just that it’s easier to take the more tonal stuff for granted.
Easing towards (and into) the 20th century, the quartets by Ravel and Debussy are here, from the LP days when you didn’t need to add a third piece to fill out a disc. Also Borodin’s Quartet No. 2, which lent a tune to “Kismet,” and the unsurprisingly lyrical quartet by Verdi.
They recorded Dohnányi’s Quartet No. 2 in 1980; twenty-five years later they returned to it with a live-performance recording that featured their new cellist, Peter Wiley. Soyer retired in 2001 after playing with the quartet for an astonishing (for any quartet) 37 years, and he recommended this student of his as a replacement. The concert also included Dohnányi’s Quartet No. 3, which is just as romantically lyrical as its predecessor, and Kodály’s Quartet No. 2, which is more choppy and angular even while remaining decidedly Hungarian.
To finish this survey on a Romantic note, we return to Schubert. Alongside the “Trout” Quintet, you’ll find Schubert’s last three quartets, his brief Quartettsatz, and the glorious Quintet in C (the piece that persuaded young me to love chamber music). Schubert’s Quartet No. 13 is a dark-hued piece that begins with a serpentine arpeggio from the second violin as viola and cello sound an ominous throb. Soon the first violin lays a melancholy melody over top of it, and the whole thing hypnotizes you along an ominous journey. I became familiar with the piece through a 1953 Budapest Quartet recording, where that movement came in at just under fourteen minutes. The Guarneri Quartet version you’ll find in this set is a slightly brisker 11:43, but with a very controlled energy. Interestingly, when this ensemble re-recorded the piece for Arabesque in 1999, they lopped a minute off that timing. The Juilliard Quartet went in the opposite direction, going from 10:37 in 1965 to a comparatively sprawling fourteen minutes in their 1982 recording. So there’s room for re-thinking, for interpretive flexibility, as Steinhardt noted in his book Indivisible by Four, a wonderful and wonderfully well-written journey through the quartet’s history and daily life.
But their RCA recording of this piece quickly became my go-to because of the pulsating life I found in its tracks. Without making any obvious tempo variations, they gave each phrase the kind of life an operatic character might have – or the forlorn subject of a Schubert song.
As a violin student persisting through my teens, I made two important discoveries. I would never be very good at the instrument, and playing chamber music gave me the greatest pleasure. This meant roping in others, most of them better, from the high-school orchestra, but a quartet of us tackled Haydn and Mozart and even, at my insistence, some early Beethoven. I was hoping we’d progress into his Rasumovsky Quartets, but our attempt at the first of them fell apart discouragingly. It was one thing to enjoy a recording of the piece, quite another to try to crawl inside of it.
I had borrowed the recording that introduced me to the piece from my local library, part of a three-LP set of Beethoven’s middle quartets recorded by the Guarneri Quartet. That quartet, his no. 7, opens with a wistful cello melody over tremolos from the higher strings, then eases into a sweet cascade imploring all of the strings to add their voices. What I didn’t know at the time was that I was listening to what would become, for me, the definitive recording of this piece – and Beethoven’s other quartets as well. The Guarneri Quartet followed with a four-LP box of the five late quartets and the Grosse Fuge, and, no doubt seeing a continuing market, another three-LP set, this of the six early ones.
I couldn’t afford to buy them, and my library wasn’t hustling to acquire them, either, so I concocted some schemes to raise the money. Not all of them were what you’d term strictly legit, I recall, but I believed that the noble cause of classical music justified the means. Besides – who knows? I might one day end up writing about this stuff.
Guarneri Quartet
The Complete RCA Album Collection
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