LAFOLIA:
It's been said a hundred times in fifty different ways and needs to be said again (and again): were it not for fiercely dedicated independents such as David Lefeber's Metier label, music lovers with a taste for adventure would be far less served. This Catalan string quartet disc is a remarkable release.
We begin at the brilliant surface. The recording itself, the venue an English church, (Caudillo Lefeber's also the engineer) is about as good as they get. This is exemplary string sound and the ambient space is exactly right (contrary to one's general opinion of the overly resonant, midrange-thin character of English chamber-music recordings). The Kreutzer Quartet plays with precision, heart, and soul. The annotator, first violinist Peter Sheppard Skaerved, writes of a Catalan School, along with references to other composers that the sub-connoisseur may find tough going. Not to fret. Your reporter, likewise ignorant of differences among Spanish schools of the 20th century, fails to detect a stylistic or spiritual lineage -- a commonality, if you like -- among these quartets, yet they impress me, the four, as unique and uniquely engaging and therefore in need of discovery and dissemination. Once again, up Metier! One point our annotator makes is certainly well taken: that musiccreated and performed outside what we like to think of as centers of great economic and cultural significance is too often disregarded. I find myself both guilty of this attitude and much chastened by what I hear emitting from my speakers.
Miguel Roger's second string quartet of 1994 impresses as perhaps the most daring in terms of departure from the richly Romantic foundation from which the program takes flight, yet nothing here could ever be confused with anything partaking of full-tilt modernism along the lines of Nono, say, or the New York School, though we do hear a great deal of atonality that, in the case of Soler's fifth quartet of 1995 especially, serves the music's elegiac mood most handsomely well. I'm listening as I write to Sardˆ's 1978 Quartet as, in effect, a running reminder of how passionately juicy this Catalan music is. Maybe I ought to reconsider my comment about one's failure to detect a Catalanesque character. Let's go back to that "richly Romantic foundation." I remain yet largely a stranger to Catalonian musical culture, but I think I've succeeded in detecting (as will you) a rich vein of agreeably histrionic expressivity -- and I intend that as praise -- common to the four quartets. Whatever, marvelous stuff.
Mike Silverton
MUSICWEB:
Introduced with a polemical essay by Peter Sheppard Skaerved, here are string quartets from the Barcelona school of composers, headed by Josep Soler (b. 1935), teacher of the other two composers represented. He reminds us that beyond the power centres of great, rich cities there are 'extraordinary and unique compositional schools ranging from the Baltic republics to Korea' which we must take into account.
Peter Sheppard (as we used to know him when his brother Philip was still the Kreutzers' cellist) celebrates the Catalan school's determination to 'engaged with the established canon'. Time warp, or fruitful quarrying of a rich vein?
To simplify, all these works share a language which does not go far beyond Schoenberg's and Berg's. The longest, and for many collectors it will prove the most interesting, is Soler's 1995 26 minute meditation upon Beethoven's Heiliger Dankgesang from Op. 132, diatonic with subtle distortions and little surprises, eschewing the faster sections Beethoven himself introduced for contrast in his long slow movement. Soler's earlier quartet of 1974 is more overtly Schoenbergian in style, and neither of them has any truck with the more extreme extended techniques of latter-day string writing. The quartet of a few years later by Albert Sarda (b.1943) does not sound like the work of a young man, nor really does the second quartet (1994) of Miquel Roger (b. 1954) sound like music by a composer in his forties who had allowed international developments in the '80s to lead him towards a personal language.
But do not let me put you off too easily. All this music is wonderfully played and recorded in a Loughton church with ideal acoustics for the purpose; the Kreutzers leave you in no doubt of their commitment and conviction. Taken one at a time, I enjoyed them all, and found the Beethoven gloss moving and thought provoking - not as personal as Strauss's metamorphosis of the slow movement of Beethoven's Seventh, but engaging nonetheless. Sheppard acknowledges that the start of Sarda's quartet from the '70s 'could almost come from Soler's 1974 piece', and this does suggest that as a teacher Soler has put his own stamp upon a generation of Catalan composers to an extent which cramped their individual development. It contrasts markedly with the individuality and liveliness of the music by numerous Spanish composers who had studied with Luis de Pablo of Madrid, many of them represented in Strasbourg's Musica1999, attended by Seen&Heard.
A few years ago I attended a few concerts in Barcelona, but found only one of contemporary music. I gained an impression that musical education there was distinctly backward and lacking in vitality. I brought back a box-full of CDs from Catalunya, listening to which proved at the time discouraging and dispiriting. Peter Sheppard Skaerved argues persuasively here that these composers are 'exploring an exciting border zone', and that it is not inappropriate that this 'music of denied expectation, rhythmic and colouristic paradox - - ' should be 'bubbling out of the intellectual and artistic cauldron that is contemporary Catalunya'.
For readers who would like to explore this music, which is rarely heard in UK, the Association of Catalan Composers has a series of monographic CDs, including Soler on CD-09-A-53, and Ars Harmonica has one devoted to Miquel Roger (with another string quartet) on AH013.
Peter Grahame Woolf
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