Chausson Quartet

[petershott@btinternet.com]

Last weekend the Doric String Quartet played the Op. 35 Chausson quartet at our Hoxne Music Festival. What a performance! I'm familiar with an excellent recording on a Hyperion disc by the Chilingirian which was issued (I think) in about 2000. I've also got lurking on my shelves a performance on a Warner Apex disc by the Quatuor Via Nova - which I recall being a pretty good one.

However I confess I hadn't quite grasped before what a very fine and utterly beautiful quartet it is. And I owe that realisation to the Doric - their performance was quite something else. I'll also stick out my neck and assert the Chausson to be a superior work to the Debussy quartet composed at much the same time. Is that heresy?

Good news is that the Doric are coming this way again in mid June to record (for Chandos) the Chausson quartet at Potton Hall (increasingly wonderful to see who goes in and out of that recording venue!). John Myerscough, the cellist in the Doric, told us Chandos are going to couple the quartet with the Op. 21 Concert for Vn, Pf & St Qt. My order is already in before the CD is made!

The less good news was a chat with them about repertoire and possible recording plans. I was busy buttonholing them about works which, if recorded, would make the heart skip and jump with joy. And, at the same time, works that would further enhance their reputation as one of the brightest young quartets around, fill glaring gaps in the 'market', sell more discs, and works that a company like Chandos should be real chuffed to add to their catalogue.

My suggested candidates were Draeske and Peter Racine Fricker - not much in common perhaps, but both would meet the rough criteria above. Judged by the Doric recordings of the Schumann quartets, it is almost as if the Doric was designed to perform Draeske. I think they might do these three quartets marvellously. They have only been recorded once before - very well indeed, but on the AK/Coburg discs which seem to be only intermittently available (and expensive when they do appear). With a bit of a push by the Doric and a splash by Chandos then people outside this forum might come to realise that the Draeske quartets are unquestionably among the finest quartets composed in the second half of the 19th century.

Second candidate - the PR Fricker quartets. I once heard the Amadeus perform the 2nd, and almost fell off my chair staggered by the melodic richness of the work. That was 45 years ago (shiver me timbers!), and I've never encountered any other performance let alone recording. I rate enormously highly the Doric recordings of the Korngold (and Walton) quartets, and if those recordings are so good on account of the clarity of their playing and balance between all 4 parts then just imagine what they might do with PRF.

The response to these suggestions? Lots of welcome and real interest. But (and here comes the depressing bit) if we're an ambitious quartet, aiming for the top, want invitations to prestigious music festivals in Vienna, Salzburg etc, lucrative broadcasting and recording contracts etc etc then we simply can't do works outside the central mainstream. In order to compete we have to be associated with Haydn, Beethoven, Schumann etc (which of course we love playing anyway). The nub of it is that if our reputation develops as a quartet which is especially committed to works that lazy journalists and FM Classic presenters have taught the punters, whose access to music is via such things as the pages of Gramophone, is 'second best', 'second rate or inferior' or 'marginal', then in turn we become thought of as a second rate quartet with complacent ambitions and no wish to aspire to the peaks in string quartet literature. Survival and reputation demand we wear out our fingers on e.g. the Op. 131 Beethoven quartet (of which they gave a performance in the second half of the concert that conveyed to me far more than I've experienced in the countless performances of the work I've heard in the last half century!)