Agreed. Their Schumann is very fine, and the Hindemith was illuminating. Definitely worth a Listen Again, if it's there.

Why?

Ahem.

I think they're superb but that's also just an opinion. Their Bartók in particular is intoxicating like no other recordings. It's a pity though that at their current rate of production they won't complete the cycle until 2031. (First release 2001, second 2007 and that with half the personnel changed...)

There's a dreadful mistranslation in the booklet for their recording of Hartmann 1 & Bartók 4. It's in a reference to the fact that they play from memory:

'For the fact is, any missing, in essence superfluous, notes are no more than the outward aspect of a truly unhampered journey inwards, to the poetic "heart of the matter".'

On the face of it, that looks like a pretty lame excuse for stuff-ups. But the German original is:

'Denn die fehlenden, weil überflüssig gewordenen Noten sind ja nur der äußere Aspekt einer dann erst wirklich ungehinderten Wende nach innen, hin zum poetischen Kern der Werke.'

'Noten' means primarily 'printed music', not 'notes'. The translation should have been something like:

'For the printed parts, absent because they have become superfluous, are of course only the outward aspect of an inward journey, only now genuinely unimpeded, towards the poetic core of the work.'

Tut-tut, I say.

I thought there was some inexplicably vulgar playing in a bit of the slow movement, and the Schumann kind of coasted, not a great piece. The Holliger had something about it but lacked musical argument to my ears, some clever effects and the thematic`material was clear (but there was no subsequent reaosn for it to be).

I just finally got through the whole programme on Listen Again. What a beautifully and intelligently put together concert. I didn't really know that early Schubert quartet, even though I must have listened to it a few times on the Quatuor Mosaïques disc where it's combined with the "Rosamunde" quartet. All three pieces reflected on one another in interesting ways.

What struck me about the Holliger was the way the four instruments are fused into a single multifaceted "instrument" whose complex sound constantly mutates from one shape to another, as if flowing over and around irregular terrain. (Actually Holliger's First Quartet is related to it in this regard, although its sound material is radically different.) The addition of the performers' voices to an already dense and unstable harmony at the end is both a "logical" conclusion to what has gone before and a reaching out of the music into a new and quite deathly realm of expression. I don't think using a term like "musical argument" is relevant to it, since it seems more focused on an idea of growth and flow than on any kind of rhetoric.

I'm always fascinated by the effect of going "back in time" from a new work to something older - it had the effect on this occasion of making the Schumann quartet sound very strange, because I seemed to be listening for (and hearing) different things in it, different views so to speak, after the almost unbroken fullness of the Holliger, so that Schumann seemed far more transparent, even sparse, than usual, and almost fragmentary in form. I can well imagine that some listeners when it was originally performed might have regarded it as incoherent or even "cacophonous", although as is normal in these cases their voices have in the meantime been forgotten. I say that because the usual depressing splutter has broken out at TOP over the Holliger piece.

John, you say Holliger's music "fails miserably". Why put all the blame on the music for failing? Listening is a two-way process.

Interesting view, Richard- I didn't feel the performance brought out those qualities, I felt it needed more differentiation, antiphony say-but you point out the homogenity H was aiming at. I'm not convinced it works`on those terms, but I'll give it another go. John, it might help to imagine it as if it were soundttrack to a slightly disturbing film-eastern european cartoon/ puppetry applied  etc?

I haven't heard the concert yet, but am looking forward to doing so, being a great fan both of the Zehetmair Quartet and of much of Holliger's (and Schumann's) music - I've been somewhat disappointed by numerous of the works I've heard of Holliger from the last 10 years or so, generally finding them over-reliant on rather tired forms of unmediated expressionist gesture and figuration, but it sounds like this work might be different.

But as regards the response a batch of people over at TOP, I don't really think it's worth spending large amounts of time arguing with them, any more than it is with a right-wing Likud Party member over the benefits of removing all settlements from the West Bank, or with a leader of the Russian mafia about how one should not resort to violence. They clearly have a pretty firm idea of what they want from music in broad terms (and I would reckon their view is shared in essence by a very large number, if not the majority, of classical music listeners), which a quartet like the Holliger 2nd evidently does not satisfy. I have practically no time for disco music (except when radically defamiliarised in the context of albums by Throbbing Gristle, and the like), and tend to be unhappy if a contemporary work aping disco is sandwiched inside a programme of other music I want to hear. Same goes for Karl Jenkins; I could give my reasons for disliking his work, and especially disliking what he has come to represent, but I don't particularly feel I should have to justify that. Some people will say they are genuinely moved by a Jenkins work; I put them in the same category as those who have a similar response to a hideously manipulative and sentimental Hollywood weepie. And I know that others will say that some of us only like music like Holliger (or others) because we automatically like anything that's highly dissonant or whatever. They would prefer not to have such works inside a chamber recital at the Wigmore, and I don't think their minds will be changed - putting any work of contemporary music on a programme, let alone something radical like Holliger, consistently reduces audience figures, as many a programmer and festival director knows. If this were in the US, you would find considerable numbers of subscribers making a point of very loudly and publicly walking out during the Holliger. This isn't going to change, nor the predominant (and relatively unchallenged, nowadays) view that music is primarily for entertainment. Trying to refocus things on those listeners, as if somehow the fact that they do not respond to the piece is their fault rather than anything else (I get very annoyed if someone says something like that to me about Karl Jenkins (as I have heard from my family, when my mother insists on playing me her Adiemus disc, her and our next-door neighbour absolutely adamant that the only reason I don't like it is snobbery)), hardly seems likely to convince them. I'd just try to persuade people that there is a place, indeed an important place, in society for a different kind of music/art, even if they personally don't want to partake of it. John, I can imagine how that Holliger piece probably 'fails' according to your terms of reference - can you accept that other frames of reference for music might also be legitimate?