Beethoven String Quartet Lindsay

Beethoven's two string quintets are among his least-played major works. This is perhaps understandable in the case of the String Quintet in E flat major, Op. 4, which is based on a serenade from the composer's early Bonn years. That's interesting enough in itself, for it places you inside the expansion of Beethoven's creative capabilities when he came under Haydn's tutelage in Vienna (although this work sounds more like Mozart than Haydn). The String Quintet in C major, Op. 29, was composed in 1800 and 1801, and its absence from the mainstream repertoire is harder to explain.

These performances are every bit as searching and exhilarating as the Lindsay’s previous Haydn recordings for ASV. Theirs is chamber-music-making of unusual recreative flair, untouched by the faintest hint of routine. Many quartets still seem to treat Haydn as an agreeable aperitif to the ostensibly meatier fare later in the programme. But both live and on disc the Lindsay bring to the composer the same dedication and interpretative insight that mark their playing of Beethoven or late Schubert.

Recording exclusively for Sanctuary Classics, the Lindsays’ extensive discography includes complete cycles of Beethoven and Bartók, and a series devoted to Haydn, Schubert and to 'The Bohemians'. In 1984 they received the Gramophone Award for their recording of the Beethoven ‘Late’ Quartets. As an enthusiast of the Lindsays, I have long admired their special affinity for the string quartets of Schubert. This four disc box set from Sanctuary Classics on their Resonance label uses previously released material and proves a fitting tribute to the ensemble’s art.

Recording exclusively for Sanctuary Classics, the Lindsays’ extensive discography includes complete cycles of Beethoven and Bartók, and a series devoted to Haydn, Schubert and to 'The Bohemians'. In 1984 they received the Gramophone Award for their recording of the Beethoven ‘Late’ Quartets. As an enthusiast of the Lindsays, I have long admired their special affinity for the string quartets of Schubert. This four disc box set from Sanctuary Classics on their Resonance label uses previously released material and proves a fitting tribute to the ensemble’s art.

Following the Artemis Quartet‘s prizewinning Beethoven Quartet cycle on Virgin Classics, the Berlin-based ensemble has recorded Schubert’s last three quartets, works that Artemis cellist Eckart Runge praises for both their “incredible simplicity and purity” and their “almost terrifying modernism”. Awarded both Germany‘s prestigious Klassik ECHO award and France’s Grand Prix de l’Académie Charles Cros in 2011 for their Virgin Classics Beethoven cycle, the members of the Artemis Quartet now release an all-Schubert CD. It presents the composer’s final three string quartets: No 13 in A minor, ‘Rosamunde’ (which draws on his incidental music for Helmina von Chezy’s play Rosamunde); No 14 in D minor, ‘Death and the Maiden’ (with its haunting second movement based on his song Der Tod und das Mädchen), and No 15 in G major.

In their survey of Haydn's string quartets for ASV, the Lindsays have set about the business of restoring these Classical masterpieces to their proper place in the repertoire, with all their brilliant wit and brusqueness intact, and without undue sweetening or romanticizing. The point, it seems clear, is to bring Haydn out from under the familiar shadows of Mozart and Beethoven, and to render his quartets as the true models of quartet writing, not as light Rococo divertissements or tamer antecedents of greater works. The Lindsays are sharp in their characterizations of Op. 33, Nos. 3, 5, and 6, and their lean textures, crisp articulation, transparent repartee, and pungent attacks distinguish these performances from more commercially pretty or polished versions.