String Quartets (Hagan Quartet)

This is really top-notch, but in a field where the competition is particularly strong. If you have a precise idea of how you like the Bartok quartets done I think you need to sample a good half-dozen current sets to see which suits you best. Myself, I am comparatively open to suggestion in this matter. Back in the 60's the Juilliard Quartet recorded a set that ranks as a classic - they had been promoting the Bartok quartets as a specialisation. I recommend it fervently to anyone who can still find it on LP, as sadly it seems to be absent from today's catalogues. What intrigues me in comparing the Hagens with it is how different the overall impression contrives to be despite a close similarity in the more tangible features. Tempi throughout are very little different, to take the most obvious issue. The difference is in the instrumental tone, and it's emphasised by the type of recorded sound each is given. The recording of the Juilliard group is admirable, with perfectly silent surfaces for the first 5 works and only a minor flaw on the 6th. The Juilliard are warmer, the Hagens more austere. Occasionally I can pinpoint some difference, such as more vibrato from the Juilliards in the opening `Mesto' of the last quartet, but overall it's a matter of a different `feel', very perceptible but very hard to define.

There is no getting away from taking some kind of intellectual view of this music. Bartok is not always uncompromising and forbidding in his idiom to say the least. The first piano concerto is a flinty bit of work indeed and so is the Miraculous Mandarin ballet, but the more famous violin concerto and even (perhaps surprisingly) Bluebeard's Castle are far from difficult to come to terms with. The quartets in general seem to me to incline towards his severe side, but not uniformly. Broadly, I would separate the first quartet from the others. Music had come to a Rubicon by the end of the 19th century. Schoenberg found a `sublime inevitability' in the quartets of Brahms. So do I, but the trouble with inevitability is that there's not much to be added to it. Schoenberg's own revolutionary Second Viennese School could still take Brahms as the foundation of their own style, but in general the more distinguished quartet-writers of the early 20th century who had come under German influence felt a need to strike out in some new way without abandoning traditional tonality entirely as Schoenberg did. Folk-music came into vogue and its influence is clear variously in Ravel, Britten and Vaughan Williams, and of course Bartok dedicated himself to a methodical study of the folk-music of the Balkans. Bartok also took as the model for his first essay Beethoven's great quartet in C# minor, the least `inevitable' of that master's quartets, rather an extended fantasia with no divisions between movements. Bartok's sound at the start recalls Beethoven's strongly, and there are numerous detailed points of resemblance. Thereafter Bartok aimed at some inevitability of his own, using a variety of structural devices - repetition, variation, recapitulation - to strengthen the sense of formal coherence.

This is music of the elements rather than of the emotions, I would say, just as I would say that of a lot of Sibelius. It has a far more abstract and `absolute' sense about it than the quartets of Britten and still more those of Shostakovich have. For that very reason I find the approach that the Hagen quartet adopt to be impressive and convincing, and the recorded tone they are given to be well tailored to their style. We each need to have at least an approximate idea of what this music is all about, and I would enjoin caution in reading the liner-note with this set. It sounds authoritative, but I came away with a distinct sense that it doesn't so much have something to say as have to say something. The thoughts seem to me disjointed and random, lacking a coherent vision.

For my own part, I find Bartok fascinating. He is not the friendliest musical genius that ever was, but he is not a musical ogre either. I can't shake off my liking for the Juilliard effect in these works, but the way the Hagens go about them is not only convincing in its own right but a very illuminating counterweight to the style of their great forerunners. It is absolutely `authentic' on its own, and the playing is superlative. They will not mislead you about Bartok in any way. Whether they will suit you best out of the current offerings I simply have no way of knowing.

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