Paul Shoemaker

The performances by the Emerson, Fitzwilliam and Brodsky are quite different while equally valid. The Fitzwilliam version is richly romantic and emotionally charged, sort of the "Leopold Stokowski" performance. The Emerson quartet version is at times fast, tense, highly energetic, sort of like an "Arturo Toscanini" version. The Brodsky version is carefully crafted, balanced, slightly understated, like a version by "Sir Adrian Boult." Why on earth would anyone want to understate things? Not because, as some people seem to feel, Sir Adrian and the British are afraid of expressing feelings, but because by understating the emotionalism in the music other aspects of the music are more clearly appreciated, and the overall musical experience is richer. Therefore one could easily find the Brodsky version to be the best version by a British quartet.

The tone poem Cauchemar, which means "nightmare" in Portuguese, is much a product of its time, similar in tone to contemporaneous works by Schoenberg, Massenet, Stravinsky and Schmitt. This is not surprising since the composer was studying in Europe at the time. Despite the title, there is nothing terribly frightening about the music which has a mood rather somewhere between the Rienzi overture of Wagner and something by Nielsen.

Many fine recordings over the years have taught me that they know Bach in Leipzig, so I expected a lot from this recording, and wasn’t disappointed. These are possibly the best, or at least equal to the best, performances of these frequently performed works I’ve ever heard. They are very fast, but there is no sense of the music being rushed; it simply erupts at this tempo as if it couldn’t help itself, as if this were the only way it could possibly be played. Having just finished reading and reviewing a book on the origins of our ideas of original performance practice, this recording is a perfect example of what it was all about, Bach’s music pretty much the way he played it and heard it himself.

There is a story about Arnold Schoenberg that bears retelling now. He was in the midst of teaching a class at UCLA when a colleague burst in excitedly proclaiming "Arnold! I am just hearing Verklärte Nacht mit HORNS!" Amid much startled posturing the two rushed out to destinations unknown, leaving the class unacknowledged. But all the various arrangements of Schoenberg’s work (I’ve never heard it with horns, but the string orchestra version with timpani is quite a good one) don’t begin to compare with the numerous outrages wreaked upon this helpless Vivaldi composition.