Gut strings contribute to bringing a high-Romantic master to life

Dudok Quartet: Tchaikovsky

The Strad Issue: May 2025

Description: Gut strings contribute to bringing a high-Romantic master to life

Musicians: Dudok Quartet

Works: Tchaikovsky: String Quartets vol.2; no.3 op.30; Quartet Movement in B flat major; The Seasons (excs.)

Catalogue number: RUBICON RCD1124

The popularity of Tchaikovsky’s string quartets seems to fall in inverse proportion to their number. The First is at the core of the Russian quartet repertoire, thanks not least to the golden ticket provided by its slow movement. His Third and final quartet, though, is a far rarer bird in concert, in that strange way in which more confident and complex later music often falls short of the popularity of its (comparably) simpler earlier counterpart, its weave of ideas and the richness of material offering up its secrets less willingly.

The Dudok Quartet Amsterdam is unstinting in its advocacy of this fine work, however. The heart of the piece is, naturally, its slow movement, placed third: marked Andante funebre, the Dudok players relish its pungent dissonances, remembering that it was composed as a memorial for a Czech violinist friend and colleague. The Dudok is just as attentive in the expansive outer movements and the pithy scherzo, in sound that is miked fashionably closely, capturing the address and attack of the gut strings more readily than tonal warmth or full dynamic range.

The couplings comprise the B flat movement that constitutes Tchaikovsky’s first attempt at a quartet, already displaying an individual – and markedly Russian – voice, and four transcriptions by members of the quartet from his piano cycle The Seasons, providing a charming envoi.

DAVID THREASHER