Vaughan Williams: The Complete String Quartets. Verdi Quartet. CPO 555 345-2.
Ralph Vaughan Williams began the earliest of these string quartets in 1897 while he was studying with Max Bruch in Berlin. Only the year before had he completed a second matriculation at the Royal College of Music in London. At that time, none of his works were published, nor would they be until 1902 when a single strophic art song (Linden Sea) became the first. This C Minor Quartet would only be heard in concert in 1904 and then basically abandoned for a century, its recording on Hyperion CDA67381/2 comprising part of a recent but modest revival. In other words, this is very early stuff by a consensus late bloomer. And it sounds like it. The Verdi Quartet's warm, sympathetic reading does little to hide the music's shaky formal grip, and a mild flavor bordering on blandness.
But the C Minor String Quartet does prompt a kind of reflection. It is exactly the type of thing many composers never got past writing. (These would be mainly the second- or third-tier composers whose works the CPO label has made a reputation recording.) We know that Vaughan Williams soon moved past this stage. (And for that matter so did Sibelius, whose early, similarly middling chamber works provide a striking parallel.) In Vaughan Williams's case it wasn't just a situation of latent talent slowly manifesting itself. There was also a conscious realization to which he was coming: the path to full self-discovery lay with his immersion in English folk and church music. Elements of these would help in forging a mature compositional voice at once distinctive and hard-won.
The first numbered and published String Quartet (the G Minor of 1908) marks the true beginning of Vaughan Williams's professional life as a composer, his final apprenticeship (under Maurice Ravel) only lately completed. While it doesn't yet usher in a full maturity (it was revised in 1921), the distance it shows from the C Minor Quartet of a decade earlier is vast. Here we really start to encounter elements of his trademark "Englishness," with strong modal inflections, folk rhythms, and other clear assimilations of traditional music. The themes are much stronger and more memorable, and the harmonies start to assume the pastel colors that would be so pronounced later on. The problem with the Verdi Quartet's approach here is that they bring excessive precipitousness and heaviness to the work. This is one of the earliest large-scale compositions by RVW in which he encounter his famous "visionary" quality; it scarcely comes off in the Verdis' performance.
The Second String Quartet in A Minor bears the ridiculous subtitle "For Jean on her Birthday." (Jean Stewart was a violist who was part of the Menges Quartet, which Vaughan Williams had in mind when he composed this work.) It is of a spikier aesthetic than his early-period efforts, and dates from much later – during World War II. The Verdi Quartet does better here, though I'm still missing a certain suppleness that superior performances exude. There is also an odd, hollow sort of sound quality at times...almost like a kind of reverb. Finally, both here and in the G Minor Quartet these string players occasionally like to accentuate subordinate lines at the expense of more important melodies.
As someone who has spent a lot of time researching and writing about Vaughan Williams, I always want to be happy when new recordings of his music get released. But it is difficult to see this particular issue as something more than a missed opportunity. For the mature numbered quartets, I recommend the excellent alternative provided by the Maggini Quartet on Naxos 8.555300.
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