ATOMOS – The Art of Musical Concentration
Works by Haydn, Beethoven, Bartók, György Kurtág and Webern
Cuarteto Quiroga
Cobra COBRA 0088 58:35 mins
The Cuarteto Quiroga’s new album sets out an intriguing idea: how did great composers express themselves concisely, distilling the essence of their art into intense utterances of brief duration? One master of concentrated musical forms was Webern, and the Quiroga players include the penultimate number from his Six Bagatelles,
Op. 9 as a bonus; but in our own time there is the Hungarian composer György Kurtág – his Secreta, recorded here for the first time, is a wonderful example of his ability to say a great deal with economy of means. It was written in memory of László Dobszay, a Hungarian authority on liturgical chant and folk music who died in 2011, and Kurtág describes his piece as funeral music. Its sustained keening sounds on the threshold of audibility eventually lead to the emergence of what sounds like the ghost of a folk tune in typically Hungarian short-long rhythm, with the reiterated melodic interval of the minor third creating a rather haunting effect.
Haydn’s isolated D minor Quartet, Op. 42 is the shortest among his great string quartets, and one of the most neglected. The aggressive manner in which the Cuarteto Quiroga attack its very beginning is curiously at odds with Haydn’s characteristic ‘innocentemente’ marking, but thereafter the performance is admirably intimate and expressive. The players offer remarkably polished accounts of Beethoven’s ‘serioso’ Quartet, Op. 95, and Bartók’s Third Quartet. The final moments of the Beethoven, where the music seems to shrug off the intense drama that has been unfolding thus far, is dizzyingly fast, but it does reflect the composer’s metronome marking. Here – and throughout the recording – the playing itself is technically impeccable. Misha Donat
