Air From Another Planet

 I'm listening to more of The Juilliard String Quartet's 15 CD set The Early Columbia Recordings 1949-56.

Arnold Schoenberg: String Quartets #1-4; Berg String Quartet; Webern Five Movements for String Quartet

The Juilliard String Quartet recorded the complete Schoenberg String Quartets over a dozen sessions at Columbia's 30th Street Studio in 1951 and 1952. They were released on three LPs in 1953, with fabulous covers designed by Abstract Expressionist James Brooks. Brooks was a friend of Jackson Pollock & Lee Krasner; when they relocated to East Hampton, he moved into their Greenwich Village studio.

These paintings are very much apposite to the music on these records, which emphasize the expressionist, highly emotional flavour of the first two quartets. Other more recent recordings, by the LaSalle or Arditti Quartets, for example, make what I think are slightly more convincing versions of the last two, 12-tone quartets. But the Juilliard's recordings are faithful, I think, to the spirit of the composer, who died in July of 1951, just before these recordings began. The 3rd and 4th Quartets are much more than mathematical constructs, and require emotional commitment as well as precision and clarity. The Juilliard Quartets bring it all to the last two, but are, I think most outstanding in the great 2nd Quartet.

Schoenberg's 2nd String Quartet is a landmark work in classical music. He wrote this music while caught up in a horrible domestic drama - he discovered his wife was having an affair with his close friend, and when she eventually returned to Schoenberg, the friend committed suicide. To help work through these events, Schoenberg introduced a soprano in the third and fourth movements, singing songs set to two poems of Stefan George:

I feel air from another planet.

The faces that once turned to me in friendship

Pale in the darkness before me.

The pain Schoenberg suffered is translated to his music in the most expressionist way, while suddenly, hundreds of years of tonal music unravels before our ears.

"Surprisingly, without any expectation on my part, these songs showed a style quite different from everything I had written before.... New sounds were produced, a new kind of melody appeared, a new approach to expression of moods and characters was discovered."

Schoenberg's use of the passive voice here is quite astounding. It's as if his revolutionary move to atonality was done without his own volition. The system he eventually created to move on from traditional music was forged in the fire of jealousy, pain, grief and guilt.

This is an outstanding performance of this work. Soprano Uta Graf and the Juilliard Quartet are especially good in the fourth movement, capturing perfectly its sense of ecstatic mystery. Arnold Schoenberg, completely steeped in the over-emotional, over-ripe world of Zemlinsky, Mahler and Richard Strauss has his crisis, and bravely moves on to the thin air of atonality and the coldly precise "Method of composing with twelve tones which are related only with one another." And the Juilliard String Quartet are there to guide us in following Schoenberg's epic journey.

Berg and Ravel: a happy combination

I'm listening to more of The Juilliard String Quartet's 15 CD set The Early Columbia Recordings 1949-56.

Alban Berg: Lyric Suite; Maurice Ravel: Quartet in F Major

The Early Recordings set continues with two 10" LPs combined in one CD. The Berg was recorded in August of 1950, while the Ravel is from February of 1951. Unfortunately, the CD is included here in the Berg slipcase, mimicking the LP sleeve, so there's a cover and liner notes for that work, but not the Ravel. I was able to track down the Ravel front cover from an eBay listing, but haven't come across the back cover. 

The Juilliard Quartet recorded the Berg Lyric Suite at least two other times: for RCA in 1961 (with works by Webern), and a live Italian Swiss Radio-Television recording with Beethoven's final Quartet, op. 135. More than one reviewer for these three recordings has commented that the Juilliard's emphasis is very much on the lyrical side of this music, rather than the more emotional, expressionist side. I was captivated by this recording, the Juilliards' first recording!

As to the Ravel, the standard LP coupling is of course, the Debussy String Quartet, and that's what Columbia released from the Juilliard Quartet in 1971. This coupling is a propos because Ravel's model was the Debussy Quartet, and instructive because of how different the two works sound in the end, each composer going in a different direction from a common beginning. Meanwhile, back in 1950, the Juilliard's recording of the Ravel Quartet on the 10" LP is remarkable. Perhaps it's partially because of this juxtaposition with the Berg, but this music sounds fresh and alive and modern. This is one of my favourite CDs in the Early Recordings set.

Deity is in this Place! Numen Inest!

 I'm listening to more of The Juilliard String Quartet's 15 CD set The Early Columbia Recordings 1949-56.

Darius Milhaud: Cantate de L'Enfant et de la Mère; The Household Muse

This was one of the first albums from the Juilliard String Quartet recorded by Columbia; it was released in June of 1950. It contains two works by Darius Milhaud with a special authenticity: the Cantate de L'Enfant et de la Mère is narrated by Madeleine Milhaud, Darius's wife, and conducted by the composer. The Household Muse for solo piano was played by Milhaud himself.

I'm trying to put myself in the position of someone listening to this LP at his or her grammophone back in 1950. This was contemporary music in the sense that Milhaud was still alive; the Cantata was written in 1938, while the piano work was only five years old. And it might have sounded "modern" to some ears, though Milhaud's most challenging modernist phase was well in the past by then. I wonder if it would have seemed fresh and new in 1950, or merely old-fashioned and a bit sentimental. I love this music so much, but it's hardly leading edge. The performers sell this in just the right way: sentimental, but not mawkish, homespun but with the numinous power of the household gods of ancient Rome:

"A religion of usages and sentiment rather than of facts and belief, and attached to very definite things and places—the oak of immemorial age, the rock on the heath fashioned by weather as if by some dim human art, the shadowy grove of ilex, passing into which one exclaimed involuntarily, in consecrated phrase, Deity is in this Place! Numen Inest!—it was in natural harmony with the temper of a quiet people amid the spectacle of rural life, like that simpler faith between man and man, which Tibullus expressly connects with the period when, with an inexpensive worship, the old wooden gods had been still pressed for room in their homely little shrines."

- Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean

I guess I have something of the same feeling myself when it comes to this music. The Deity is in the LP itself, somehow. The record album is a "homely little shrine", even more a fetish object today than it was 70 years ago. That's why I'm not listening to this Juilliard String Quartet set streamed on Spotify, but on these CDs stamped with the sacred marks of the Long-Playing Record of 1950.

Speaking of sacred marks, the beautiful album cover design isn't credited, but I'm fairly confident that it's by Darrill Connelly. He did the covers for the three Bartok albums that were released immediately after this record. 

 

 

Bartok String Quartets in a masterful recording

Dennis Stock's photograph of the Juilliard String Quartet;
undated, but it looks to be from the mid-50s

I'm listening to more of The Juilliard String Quartet's 15 CD set The Early Columbia Recordings 1949-56. What a marvellous project this is!

In two New York concerts, on February 28 and March 28, 1949, the Juilliard Quartet performed the six string quartets of Béla Bartók, to enthusiastic audiences. This was less than a year after Columbia Records unveiled the Long Playing record - the LP - at a press conference in the Waldorf Astoria on June 21, 1948. Soon thereafter, the ensemble was in the 30th Street Studio recording all six of these wonderful works, producing fine records but also setting the stage for the many comprehensive sets of the LP era. To market the three individual discs as a set, the three LPs shared a single, excellent but uncredited liner note essay, and three wonderful album cover designs by Darrill Connelly. And all three LPs (three double 78rpm albums as well) were released the same day: August 14, 1950.

Though Olin Downes gave a very positive review in the New York Times of those first two concerts, already by 1952 the Times reviewer R.P. wondered, in a review of a second Juilliard Bartok cycle concert series, whether "the playing could have been a trifle over-refined." 

The precision of ensemble was wonderfully exact. the balance of tone and the blending of timbres was exemplary, and there was fine integration in the approach of the four men. But for one listener the note of human passion sounded a little thin.

This criticism will, I'm sure, come up many times before we finish all 15 of these CDs. I would normally be a bit skeptical of this, but in the Bartok case I think it's at least partly apropos. In their second recording from 1998, the Takács Quartet, which I know the best in these works, doubles down on the "human passion", emphasizing Bartok's folkloric sources. The Juilliard, by contrast, focus more on Bartok's hard, streamlined modernism. Both are obviously contained within the score; this is a matter of emphasis only. These are still excellent versions, and remarkable for both interpretation and recorded sound, not just for 1950, but today.