Hans Keller

Hungary’s prize-winning Keller Quartet, whose account of mentor György Kurtág’s Musik für Streichinstrumente received the highest praise internationally, now focuses upon baroque music with a revelatory performance of Bach’s The Art of Fugue "The Keller Quartet take an experimental approach to Bach", writes Hans Klaus Jungheinrich, "inclining less to long lines than to ‘respiratory’ phrasing." The music breathes, yes, and the Keller Quartet’s interpretation of Die Kunst der Fuge will be one of the most talked-about Bach performances of the year.

The late Hans Keller regarded Hindemith as one of the few composers able to produce what he called 'intrinsic' quartets, that's to say quartets addressed in the first place to the player (the listener being, as Keller put it, "a more or less welcome eavesdropper"). This collection includes the recently re-discovered early work in C major. The performances are technically and musically excellent. As a previous reviewer has noted, there is much to be said for listening to them in the order in which they were composed, so as to follow the development of Hindemith's style over a period of three decades.

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

Though Mozart claimed to dislike the flute, he wrote for it with skill and these quartets, written between 1777 and 1787, are not pot-boilers – pace the late Hans Keller, who wrote that they “show Mozart’s hate for the instrument”, but didn’t bother to explain how. These players, two from the Hagen Quartet, are big names, Gidon Kremer’s not least, and play well as an ensemble, the excellent flautist performing with authority but not overbearingly. Indeed, they give the music love, which entirely redeems some inevitable conventionalities, as for example in the C major with its rather obvious melody and harmony – even Mozart didn’t write a towering masterpiece every day.