Comparison recordings: Melos Quartet Various DG CDs

It seems I’ve always owned a full set of the Schubert Quartets and it has always been a favorite set of mine. They go as well heard all together as they do one at a time—except with the last three, of course, of which any one is a whole day’s work.

Here we have the usual situation where someone draws a salary just to decide which quartets to put on each CD, rather than the easier and more useful course of just starting at the beginning, continuing to the middle, and proceeding on to the end. But this is the age of doing everything in as complicated a manner as possible.

I cannot imagine better performances of these works. Of course, there’s almost no such thing as a second rate string quartet*, since the work is so hard, the qualifications so demanding, and the rewards so slight that nobody would do it if they didn‘t love it, and had an independent source of income. It’s no accident that most successful quartets are made up of tenured and/or retired professors from famous music schools, as here.

These players know their Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, as Schubert did. They are alert to Schubert’s quirky sense of adventure, the smoulering darkness in his music, and are ready to run off and explore a whole new world without dropping a phrase when Schubert asks them to. And, they receive excellent recording. You could spend more money but you couldn’t get any more music. If the rest of the set is this good, and you don’t already have the music, it’s a sure good buy. Compared to the Melos group, the Kodalys are a little more rhapsodic, melodic, and sensual, whereas the Melos group, as befits a quartet from Stuttgart, are more architectural and precise. But Schubert should certainly be heard both ways, at least both of these ways and other ways as well.

*There are a few, and of course anybody can have a bad day, so I’ll not name any names.

Paul Shoemaker

 

Advertising Rates
Visitor stats
MusicWeb International
has over 21,000 Classical CD reviews on offer

Gerard Hoffnung Concerts &
The Bricklayer Story

Purchase Brilliant Classics

New Releases

New Releases

MusicWeb Recommended Recordings 2008

DISCS OF THE YEAR 2007