Vaughan Williams Violin Sonata, String Quartet No.2, Phantasy Quintet, Etc

An amateur cellist, the composer of Prince Igor was the only one of the Group of Five to have written some ten chamber works for his personal pleasure in keeping with the laws of Germanic rhetoric - to Balakirev's great displeasure. One of them is a pure masterpiece: his Quartet in D, featuring an irresistible Nocturne, which has been played round the world in various arrangements.

Furious cross-rhythms and accented repeated notes relent to hymnal lyricism in Olli Mustonen’s First String Quartet. But the peaceful third movement is an anomaly: the tension soon returns in a restless Impetuoso finale – the original melody now peppered with triumphant descent-like violin melodies. The Finnish composer describes a journey from darkness to light in the 2016 work; while the psychological aspects are clearly obvious – pacing bass lines, anxious tremolos – there is a sense of physical travelling, too, across craggy landscapes and into fantasy worlds.

The celebrated partnership of Marc-André Hamelin and the Takács Quartet has already set down reference recordings of piano quintets by Schumann, Franck and Shostakovich, and this latest addition is equally illustrious; an important milestone in the critical re-evaluation of the work of Ernő Dohnányi.

Written more than 15 years apart, these two scores, juxtaposed here for the first time, successively illustrate the somewhat morose ‘Nordic’ inspiration of the composer of Ein deutsches Requiem, then a more intimate poetic feeling, and finally a communicative serenity, the headiness of a ‘Hungarian’ dance in the Quartet, a sort of wild csárdás with quasi-orchestral force in the coda of the Quintet.

The Maggini Quartet, even more responsive than on their previous discs of British music, give revelatory performances of works that too often have been underestimated, regarded as mere diversions from the composer’s regular path. The Magginis find a rare clarity and warmth in both quartets. The First was written soon after Vaughan William’s studies with Ravel in Paris, with obvious echoes not just of Ravel but of the Debussy Quartet. The Second Quartet dates from 1942 to 1943, written in the crucial gap between the lyrical Symphony No. 5 and the abrasive No. 6. Most revelatory of all is the Maggini performance of the Phantasy Quintet of 1912, a masterpiece long neglected, weighty and compressed.

The four works offered here by the Piatti Quartet on its Rubicon label debut are all but unknown; even the Household Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, written during World War II for amateur performance, has been recorded only sparsely, and the String Quartet in E minor of Vaughan Williams Ina Boyle, having thus far been passed over in the general revival of music by women, here receives its world premiere.

This is a very complete set indeed. It includes all the quartets in the latest edition prepared by Jonathan Del Mar which restores many important markings by Beethoven and which has been done in collaboration with the Endellion Quartet. Both versions of the first quartet or included as well as Beethoven's quartet arrangement of the piano sonata Op. 14 no. 1. the Gross Fuge, both string quintets plus other works for string quartet including the two prelude and fugues.