the earth trembled
Signum Quartett
rec. 2025, Sendesaal Bremen, Germany
Pentatone PTC5187527 [81]
The Bremen-based Signum Quartett favours contextual discs which often feature arrangements by their violist Xandi van Dijk. Their Schubert disc for Pentatone is a case in point, with string quartets rubbing shoulders with songs arranged by the violist for quartet, and this latest disc reprises the idea. Janáček’s two quartets and the much rarer-on-disc Vitězslava Kaprálová’s Quartet are surrounded – or besieged – by a battery of the former’s songs in arrangements for four string voices.
Though the focus on the string quartets is, therefore, somewhat diffused, the Signum Quartett’s performances are admirable. They play the First Quartet with intensity and incisive rhythmic attack and the contrast, in the third movement, between propulsive ostinatos and ‘scratchy’ tonal quality is, as it should be, marked. They are expressive and affecting in the slow introduction to the finale and propulsive in the remainder of the movement. In the Second Quartet, van Dijk’s ‘viola d’amore’ statements are genuinely eerie. If you actually want to hear the viola d’amore, for which the quartet was originally conceived, you can try the Mandelring Quartet on Audite where there are two performances of the Quartet, one with it and one with the viola. The Signum Quartett’s location of a specific level of vocalised intensity generates genuine propulsive momentum, nowhere more so than in the galloping equine rhythms of the finale. It’s another performance full of resinous, unabashed ardour.
Kaprálová’s Quartet was composed eight years after Janáček’s death when she was only 21. Like the older composer, she was associated with the city of Brno which had burgeoned from the rather provincial, musically understaffed city of Janáček’s time to become a confident, well-equipped city. She studied at the Brno Conservatory, which had been established by Janáček in 1919, but the most marked thing about this work is that, though she was later to fall under the spell, musical and personal, of Martinů, so much of the quartet sounds derived from Janáček’s influence. Certainly, the opening movement is suffused with an animating brio, lyrical tartness, and an abrupt, expressive changeability. She differs in the slow movement in her unaffected ‘passion spent’ intimacy and in her employment of a Theme and Variations in the finale. This isn’t the first time that the quartet has been recorded, nor the first time it’s been recorded in full – she indicates cuts in the outer movements in the autograph – but it’s a penetrating, incisive and sensitive performance that will impress anyone who hears it.
The fourteen brief songs are arranged from Janáček’s collections Moravian Folk Poetry in Song and his valedictory Album for Kamila Stösslová and there is a single arranged song from Kaprálová’s collection, Vteřiny (Seconds). They’re predominantly melancholy and very brief – several last no more than 16 seconds – so serve as mood pictures – expressive states of being – and that includes the prelude to the First Quartet, an arrangement of a Waltz for piano by Leo Tolstoy, heard here in van Dijk’a arrangement. It is apparently his only known composition, and he was helped in its writing by a friend. The link is his story, the ‘Kreutzer Sonata’, the subtitle of the First Quartet.
The performances and recording are alike splendid and so are the notes. If I have a reservation about the aperçu-like nature of the arrangements, in the context of the programme as a whole, I have very few about the combatively sensitive nature of the playing.
Jonathan Woolf
Buying this recording via the link below generates revenue for MWI, which helps the site remain free
Contents
Leoš Janáček (1854-1928)
Moravian Folk Poetry in Song (1892 and 1901) arr. String Quartet by Xandi van Dijk: No. 1 Love, No. 38 Parting, No. 29 Love letter, No. 17 For whom the flower
Album for Kamila Stösslová, JW VIII / 33 (1927-28) arr. String Quartet by Xandi van Dijk:
So that one could nevermore go back, My infinite happiness, I’m waiting for you!
I will await you at the promised time! Oh for one certain look into the future! All the colours of the rainbow, Merely blind fate? Kamila, darling Kamilka, only now do I feel what love is, Oh come, come, you longed-for moment! Golden Ring
String Quartet No. 1 ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ (1923)
String Quartet No. 2 ‘Intimate Letters’ (1928)
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
Waltz in F Major arr. String Quartet by Xandi van Dijk
Vitězslava Kaprálová (1915-1940)
String Quartet, Op. 8 (1936)
Vteřiny (Seconds) Op. 18 (1936) arr. String Quartet by Xandi van Dijk: With a white kerchief he waves
