Search - Hugo [Composer] Wolf :: Hugo Wolf: Italian Serenade; String Quartet

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DAVID BRYSON | Glossop Derbyshire England | 09/21/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The performing artists on this disc are the Auryn Quartet. They have apparently been around for nearly 25 years without my managing to become aware of them, but I sense that their anonymity here is probably not of their own volition. Its members studied in Germany and in America, with the Amadeus and Guarneri Quartets respectively, and they have devoted this disc to the complete output of Hugo Wolf for string quartet.



Obviously even minor works by so great a composer as Wolf are of scholarly interest at the very least. Like his fellow-Wagnerite Bruckner he produced only one complete major composition for a chamber group, and in common with several other leading composers of roughly the same period - Verdi, Franck, Sibelius, Elgar - he turned out a single string quartet. Wolf's essay seems to me worthy and genuinely interesting, but not of the significance of any of these. Its basic trouble is that it is too big for its boots - it is simply far too long. The liner-note goes into the history of its composition, and it is quite clear that the piece gave its composer a great deal of trouble, attended with lengthy periods of indecision. Very helpfully and properly the note draws heavily on the views of Reger, which seem to me perceptive and candid. Reger is predictably thorough in his analysis, and just as predictably earnest and charmless, but his observations strike me as being very fair and balanced. This is not to say that I go along with everything he says - for instance who is Reger of all composers to criticise melodies by any other composer whomsoever? Reger's strictures in this respect are applied to the E flat intermezzo, which struck me for one as being rather attractive and easier to listen to than the big full-scale quartet itself. Another feature that occurred to me is that the actual writing for the quartet medium improves as the disc goes along. In the quartet the effect in the first movement is slightly shrill, and I really believe that this is the composer's own doing rather than some shortcoming in either performance or recording. The later movements seem an improvement in this respect, the intermezzo better still, and the Italian Serenade best of all, and I note that Reger was firmly of the opinion that the quartet version is an arrangement of an orchestral original and not the other way about.



The Auryn Quartet deserve better than to have their identities concealed, and their accounts of all three works strike me as admirable. This is not the jolliest performance of the Italian Serenade that I ever heard, but Wolf was a slightly forbidding gentleman at the best of times, and I like a touch of inwardness and withdrawal even here. No performance of this quartet is going to turn it into a crowd-pleaser, and I'm prepared to say, hearing the work now for the second time in a couple of weeks but not for 30 years prior to that, that this is really a very good account of it - honest, committed, idiomatic and straightforward, giving the piece its due without trying to `sell' it to us. The recording dates from 1998. It is perfectly good by the exacting standards that we're entitled to apply to a production from so recent a date, and although it strikes me as being less than absolutely outstanding that's the way the music strikes me too."