Haydn Quartets

The Takács Quartet, Hungarian but now resident in the U.S., takes string quartet playing back to its basics here, and does so transcendently (paradoxical as that may sound). You may find the playing a bit neutral at first, with Haydn's more dancelike rhythms rendered straightforwardly, but keep listening: each movement is a carefully polished jewel, with each instrument making up a set of perfectly sharp facets.

These six quartets represent a high point of the Viennese classical style. In his later quartets, Haydn began traveling on the road to musical Romanticism and reached out to a large musical public. These magnificent pieces, on the other hand, have an intimacy, an elegance, and a generosity of spirit that make them very special, even given the almost unparalleled series of masterpieces that the Haydn quartets represent.

The players of the Leipzig String Quartet come from the veteran ranks of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. They have recorded a variety of standard quartet for the German audiophile label MDG, often using an old monastery farmhouse whose sound environment is nothing short of ideal. They are in the midst of a cycle of Haydn quartets that began with some of the more unorthodox items and with volume 6 reaches the Op. 33 quartets, arguably the founding documents of the true High Classical quartet style. The quartet plays on period instruments (and modern replicas of period bows), resulting in a bright sound and precise articulation that doesn't differ sharply from modern-instrument performances. And indeed the performances fall into a long tradition.

The Jubilee Quartet, formed in 2006 and named so as all the members lived along the route London’s Jubilee underground line, have studied with such illustrious figures from the world of chamber music as Gunter Pichler, Thomas Brandis, Garfield Jackson and the Belcea String Quartet. They have participated in masterclasses with the Skampa, Wihan and Chilingirian Quartets. They have an impressive tally of prizes from international chamber music competitions and have a busy international schedule. Their debut album features three Haydn quartets which, as ever with this composer are brim-full of innovation, drama and wide-ranging emotions.

Eclipsed by the slightly later Op. 20 quartets, Haydn's Op. 9 set (1769-70) has received a pretty raw deal from players and commentators alike. In The Great Haydn Quartets (Dent, 1986), Hans Keller praised the D minor, No. 4, as 'the first great string quartet in the history of music', but unceremoniously dismissed the five major-keyed works as 'boring'. True, the D minor stands apart from the others in its rhetorical power and mastery of development…

– Richard Wigmore, BBC Music Magazine

The Végh Quartet was not only one of the finest string quartets from mid-twentieth century Europe, but its style was never subjected to radical change over the years from personnel changes because the four original players remained members for 38 of the 40 years of the ensemble's existence. Its style evolved in subtle ways, of course, but its essential character endured until 1978: the quartet was Central European in its sound, with a bit more prominence given to the cello in order to build tonal qualities from the bottom upward. The Végh Quartet was best known for its cycles – two each – of the Beethoven and Bartók quartets. It also performed and recorded many of the Haydn quartets, as well as numerous other staples of the repertory by Mozart, Schumann, Brahms, and Debussy. For a group that disbanded in 1980, its recordings are still quite popular, with major efforts available in varied reissues from Music & Arts, Archipel, Naïve, and Orfeo.

With the recordings on this CD, the Armida Quartet has reached the halfway mark in a project that seeks to intimately explore an entire mountain range. Mozart’s complete works for string quartet, to which they devote intense scrutiny within the framework of a recital series that pairs them with contemporary works specifically commissioned for the occasion.