Schubert
String Quartets, D887, D703
Zemlinsky Quartet
Evil Penguin EPRC0084 60 mins
Belgium’s adventurous Evil Penguin label has released several exciting recordings lately, and this new Schubert coupling from the Zemlinsky Quartet affords a meticulously persuasive listening experience.
D887 was the last of Schubert’s quartets, its near-symphonic scope and unorthodox harmonic approach presaging early Bruckner. Originally, audiences found its boldness perplexing, and even today, you’re more likely to hear ‘Death and the Maiden’ or the A minor ‘Rosamunde’ Quartet programmed, though Woody Allen buffs might remember that D887 featured on the soundtrack of his 1989 comedy-drama Crimes and Misdemeanours.
The Zemlinsky Quartet (like the Alban Berg Quartet before them) build this account along large-scale lines, both in terms of assaying its overall structure, and imparting a formal logic and inevitability to its extended time-frame. Their reading is certainly of epic proportions, played with a dynamism and urgency which at times is only barely restrained.
The first movement recapitulation, always a sublime moment, at once breathtaking and cathartic, is magically realised, while the shrieking tremolos of the Andante (which transports the listener to the edge of the abyss) disturb as they should. Tensions dissipate, if only temporarily, in the Scherzo, where yet again structural ingenuity seems to transcend boundaries imposed by the genre itself, and how masterfully the Zemlinsky Quartet manage the very taxing and purposely ambiguous finale.
As Petr Holman concludes in his helpful booklet note, this astonishing work is ‘one of the most compelling musical portraits of human fragility and inner strength’. It receives an outstanding performance here, to which the C minor Quartettsatz provides a useful foil.
