Molinari Quartet - Schnittke: String Quartets, 1-4 (2011) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

The obvious point of reference here is tile Kronos Quartet's cycle of Schnittke string quartets, released as a complete edition in 1998. But after hearing Quatuor Molinari play the same pieces I don't think I'll be going back. In fact, if anyone wants it …

The quartet's decision to open with Schnittke's Third Quartet is a puzzle at first, until you realise that everything that happens in the first two quartets reaches an uneasy stylistic resolution in the Third, written in 1983. The piece is rich in quotation: in the first few bars alone bits of Lassus, Beethoven's Grosse Fuge and Shostakovich's DSCH motif (the booklet-note mentions that 'SCH' had obvious significant for Schnittke: interesting point that I hadn't noticed) hove into view. Or rather, as played by the Quatuor Molinari, Schnittke's borrowed material hangs in the middle distance, the quartet's undemonstrative tone letting the material spill into itself by stealth.

But they can do demonstrative, too. The Beethovenian scherzo keeps tripping headlong into crisis moments where high-velocity lines are on the brink of unravelling. The physical violence of the Molinaris' attack sorts the men from the boys. And they also deliver the most persuasive account I've heard of Schnittke's problematic First Quartet (1966), which is pretty much a catalogue of then modish Penderecki/Ligeti clusters, glissandos and twangs. The Molinaris' physicality elevates the work's slightly vanilla material.

The Second (1980) and Fourth (1989) Quartets both deal witll expressions of grief. The Second Quartet stutters forwards like a reliquary of smudged chorales and weeping hymns, with the occasional merry-hell outburst. The Molinaris avoid the Kronos's tendency to over-dramatise the material, and their account of the Fourth's persistently fragmenting structure also lets the material the work. Schnittke embeds ticking time-bombs inside his material: canons undo, microtones scar melodic utterances, rich chromatic joy flips over into white-noise glissandos. But here they go off inside your brain, not in your face. Philip Clark - Gramophone

TRACKLIST

Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998)

Quatuor no. 3 [1983] 20:01
1 Andante 5:24
2 Agitato 7:24
3 Pesante 7:13

Quatuor no. 1 [1966] 18:45
4 Sonata 8:15
5 Canon 3:59
6 Cadenza 6:31

Quatuor no. 2 [1980] 21:29
7 Moderato 2:52
8 Agitato 6:13
9 Mesto 5:38
10 Moderato 6:46

Quatuor no. 4 [1989] 38:07
11 Lento 9:04
12 Allegro 8:30
13 Lento 6:36
14 Vivace 3:46
15 Lento 10:11

Canon in Memoriam Igor Stravinsky [1971]
16 Lento 4:58

PERSONNEL
Quatuor Molinari:
Louise Bessette, piano
Olga Ranzenhofer, violin
Frédéric Bednarz, violin
Frédéric Lambert, viola
Pierre-Alain Bouvrette, cello