A quartet renowned in Classical repertoire ventures into the 20th century
The Strad Issue: February 2025
Description: A quartet renowned in Classical repertoire ventures into the 20th century
Musicians: Casals Quartet
Works: Shostakovich: String Quartets vol.1: nos.1–5
Catalogue number: HARMONIA MUNDI HMM90273132 (2 CDs)
Turning first to No.3, as one of the pivotal works in Shostakovich’s entire output, I was initially nonplussed. The Casals Quartet carries elegant stratagems of Classicism – pure tone, light bows, a knowing wink at modulations, gently inflected cadences – to a ne plus ultra, as though its players had sat down to perform one of the Haydn op.20 quartets without the music, and decided to make it up as they went along.
Shostakovich would surely have approved, as a composer who took as much delight as Haydn in wrong-footing and even deceiving his listeners. In any case, the plan unfolds, movement by movement, as a dismantling of the Classical quartet tradition. The Casals takes the second-movement trio as though walking down a dead end, followed by a scherzo like a brawl in a dark alley. The form and fugal writing of the finale hold no defined shape, like a silken mask or trap.
Circling outwards from the Third, surprises await the wary and unwary alike. The joke would soon wear thin if the musicians addressed everything else in the same spirit of two-faced playfulness. Instead, the folksy accents of the Second stress its affinity with Bartók. The Andantino of no.4 rises to a point of intensity all the more effective for its singularity as an expressive peak. The third movement is rapid in the manner of the Borodin Quartet but much less blatant, more nervous and unreadable, like most photographs of the composer’s face. A fairly close studio acoustic serves to underline the Casals’s engagement with this music in the context of the quartet tradition, more than gnomic points of musical autobiography.
Booklet notes by Elizabeth Wilson bestow a seal of authority on what could become the Shostakovich cycle of and for our time. If you know these quartets, you may find yourself wondering as you listen to the Casals, whatever will happen next? And if you don’t, then what are you waiting for?
PETER QUANTRILL
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