Melos

On Trash Generator, the Sacramento trio Tera Melos builds on its prodigious mix of post-hardcore and prog, reining-in the chops in service of catchy, harmonically rich songs.

Apart from the Takacs Quartet, whose spirited, youthful account for Hungaroton/Conifer (4/88) of Schumann's three quartets was marred by inferior recorded sound, no single group has as yet given us either a complete Schumann or Brahms quartet cycle on CD—and certainly not a composite set of all six works. So all gratitude to the Melos Quartet for filling the gap. Their playing is immediately enjoyable for its warmth, its rhythmic impulse and its very positive directness. To try and place it in sharper perspective I've nevertheless taken the liberty of comparing the two discs with my cherished old LP set of the same works from the Quartetto Italiano (Philips—nla). For even though this has recently been deleted, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find it back in the shops, digitally remastered, before too long.

Anton Bruckner - Streichquintett F-dur/ String Quintet F major
Melos Quartett / Enrique Santiago
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 246 MB | Full Artwork: 53 MB | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Harmonia Mundi # HMA 1951421 | Country/Year: France 2003, 1993
Genre: Classical | Style: Romantic

The Melos Quartet is one of the leading and longest-established string quartets of the world, and is particularly known for a warm, romantic sound without overstatement of emotionality, a strong grasp of form, and highly accurate, assured playing. Its founders were four string players who already had important careers as soloists and orchestral musicians.

Both quartets on this disc are by composers who were not known for their chamber music, and in the case of Verdi, the E minor quartet stands completely outside his usual mode of composition. The Sibelius quartet, while it veers far from the well worn path of late-romantic chamber music, lies comfortably within its composer's milieu, with its angular harmonies, stark melodies, and overall enigmatic mood.

It may seem an unlikely thing to say about a German chamber ensemble, yet the Melos Quartet of Stuttgart are more suave, more feline, than the Quartetto Italiano in the opening movement of Mozart's E flat Quartet. The former have, too, the advantage of a modern recording with a more exact stereo placing of each instrument, whereas the Philips disc is close on ten years old.

Open-minded listeners looking for unfamiliar string quartets by a master composer of the same period as Beethoven and Schubert will likely be delighted by the six quartets of Luigi Cherubini. Written mostly between 1829 and 1837, the Italian-French composer's quartets are in the standard forms in the usual four movements. He fills those forms with entirely new content, which, if not as vigorously argued as Beethoven's nor as gloriously lyrical as Schubert's, is nevertheless elegantly expressive, consummately dramatic, and often utterly unexpected. Cherubini's quartets have received occasional recordings, but none have matched this set from Germany's Melos Quartet.

Bruckner's only major chamber work is given an enthusiastic reading by the Melos Quartet with the addition of Enrique Santiago on the extra viola part. The Quintet was written in 1879, during a tumultuous period in Bruckner's compositional career when he had just finished the final version of the Fifth Symphony, was about to produce the final version of the finale of the Fourth Symphony, and had just begun work on the Sixth Symphony. Most of the Quintet "sounds" like Bruckner, but there are several unusual features, and the fourth movement is one of the composer's finest.