Works by Bacewicz, Britten and Weinberg
Telegraph Quartet
AzicaRecordsACD-71381 74:08mins
The turbulent, destabilising and demoralising impact of the Second World War hovers uneasily over the three quartets in this enterprising and thought- provoking release.
Perhaps its influence is less obvious in Bacewicz’s Fourth Quartet. Composed in 1951, at a time when Stalinism was wreaking havoc on Polish musical life, its elegant and clear-cut neo-classical design, not
to mention its seemingly jaunty finale, appear, at least on the surface, to banish such connotations. Yet the Telegraph Quartet’s high-voltage account of this particular movement is anything but carefree, the skittish figurations sounding manic rather than upbeat. And if there were any further doubts about the work’s darker subtext, two powerfully projected passages in the first movement, in which a haunting folk-like melody is clothed in mysterious shivering textures, give the game away.
Similar otherworldly colours open Britten’s First Quartet of 1941, as if to suggest a retreat from the outside world, and this feeling is further reinforced in the lyrical outpouring of the slow movement whose musical language owes much to late Beethoven. The Telegraph Quartet interpret these passages with poise. Their accounts of the war-scarred second and fourth movements are technically brilliant and ferociously articulated.
Given the Telegraph Quartet’s penchant for full-blooded interpretations, it’s hardly surprising that their approach works particularly effectively in Weinberg’s epic Sixth Quartet of 1945. The performers steer a steady course through the work’s increasingly unsettling sequence of six movements, never relinquishing their grip on the musical argument and keeping the listener fully involved from first bar to last.
