Search - Ludwig van Beethoven, Lindsay Quartet :: String Quartets Op 59 1 & 3

FOND FAREWELL

DAVID BRYSON | Glossop Derbyshire England | 06/22/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Now that the Lindsays are retiring it's time to collect some of their work. In any case for some inscrutable reason I don't appear to have Beethoven's Rasumovsky quartets on cd, and the set by the Hungarian Quartet that I have lived with for so many years seems no longer to be available, so there is a simple single solution to both matters.



The first and third Rasumovskys come in total to an hour and a quarter's playing-time. For newcomers to the works, Count Rasumovsky was the musically-minded Russian ambassador to Vienna around the turn of the 19th century. In the first and second of these big quartets Beethoven incorporates a 'theme russe', to which he draws our attention. It appears that he either misunderstands the tempo of these (his deafness was already far advanced and he probably knew them only from print) or he wasn't bothered about such a detail. The works date from a particularly prolific period of his output - he seems to have been working on the fourth piano concerto, the violin concerto, the Coriolan overture, the fourth symphony, the sonata Appassionata and possibly a few other such trifles all at the same time. This was the stage of his career, after the Waldstein sonata and the Eroica symphony, when his own fully individual style had completely developed, and the quartets are not only bigger but also more assertive in expression than anything that had preceded them.



The Lindsays turn in model performances, easily recommendable. Tempi seem to me just about right throughout, the tone-quality is good and the recording is unexceptionable. They are alive to the novel and characteristic Beethoven touches - the enormous power of the main theme of the first movement in the first quartet for instance when it makes its final appearance near the end of the movement. The slow movements of both works are, for me, among the finest Beethoven ever did at any stage of his development. There is a lyrical sequence near the end of the slow movement in the first quartet and more particularly a self-repeating phrase that recurs in the slow movement of the third that seem to me oddly suggestive of Schubert or even of Brahms, and they capture the special and unusual tone of the expression very well indeed. The third quartet ends with a vigorous and extrovert fugue. I have an account of this on its own as part of a sampler disc that accompanies the Emerson Quartet's Haydn issue known as the 'Haydn Project'. On first hearing this had me whooping with delight for its sheer effervescence, taken at an unbelievable speed. I still love it, but it's something to hear for a change, a little too exhibitionistic to take as a standard. For a version to live with, the Lindsays are a safer bet.



I'm not sure, in the last resort, that the Lindsays show the ultimate degree of distinction and individuality that I associate with the quartets that I place in the 'great' class - the Busch Quartet before my own time, later the Allegri and right now the Borodin and maybe indeed the Emerson. I still can't withhold a fifth star from this disc, certainly not under the circumstances. The recording, as I've said, is very good, and the liner note is very informative despite a certain amount of the rather tedious hyperbole that seems to be felt compulsory in some quarters when discussing Beethoven. For me the unique greatness of Beethoven consists in other matters entirely, and I think the Lindsays have the measure of it."