Euclid Quartet: Breve
Afinat Records

There is so much pleasure to be had from Breve, it's a wonder its grounding concept hasn't been adopted more often. In simplest terms, the release sees Euclid Quartet—violinists Jameson Cooper and Aviva Hakanoglu, violist Luis Enrique Vargas, and cellist Justin Goldsmith—eschewing the composer-centric design of its previous albums for a set comprising concise single-movement tracks by a wildly diverse collection of composers. Calling the pieces “contrasting little gems,” Cooper said he and his partners thought it'd be fun to package these long-standing favourites into a sampler featuring pieces that have been with them for many of the quartet's twenty-five years.

In contrast to the group's earlier American Quartets: Antonín Dvorák & Wynton Marsalis, Breve presents material by eleven composers spanning three centuries. Included are Mozart, Schubert, and Puccini, but also Shostakovich, Piazzolla, Webern, Gershwin, and Bolcom. The idea originated out of the hundreds of concerts the quartet has given and specifically the short pieces the four have worked into their programmes, either as formal parts of set-lists or encores. As performed the works feel like cozy slippers the group loves to slip into.

Recorded at Indiana University South Bend, where the Ohio-formed Euclid Quartet has been the Faculty Quartet-in-Residence since 2007, Breve captures the group in fine form. They're virtuoso musicians, obviously, but it's the energy and enthusiasm the four bring to the performances that make these pieces so endearing. Exciting playing makes for engaged listening, and listeners will find themselves easily swept away by the quartet's renditions.

Written in the late 1780s, Mozart's Adagio & Fugue in C minor, K. 546 inaugurates the disc with a splendid illustration of Euclid Quartet's artistry. The musicians deliver the solemn, almost ominous opening section with sensitivity before transitioning smoothly into the dramatic cross-currents of the livelier fugue. Perhaps influenced by an Eichendorff novella that includes text about an Italian serenade played by a small orchestra, Hugo Wolf's rather impish Italian Serenade (1887) was intended to be part of a multi-part work, but the composer eventually opted for a self-contained, single-movement design. Excerpted from the third act of the satirical ballet The Golden Age, Polka is quintessential Shostakovich in its sardonic irreverence and lampooning of political pomposity. Listed as his twelfth string quartet when formally published, Schubert's suave Quartettsatz, D. 703 was written in late 1820 as the rousing opening movement of a string quartet he would never complete.

Puccini supposedly wrote Chrysanthemums in one night in 1890 in memory of Amadeo di Savoia, Duke of Savoy. With the flower associated with mourning in Italy, the tone of the piece is appropriately elegiac but melodically alluring nonetheless, and Euclid Quartet distinguishes the poignant lament with a heartfelt reading. Webern composed Langsamer Satz for string quartet in 1905, three years before his first work with an opus number and as he completed his first year as Schoenberg's pupil. Described as “a love song to the woman he would later marry,” the work is more reminiscent of his teacher's Verklärte Nacht than the twelve-tone miniatures Webern later produced. In fact, it could even be seen as a microcosm of the Schoenberg work when it likewise packs yearning, anguish, tranquility, and turmoil into its design.

Gershwin's Lullaby (1919) made its public string quartet debut in 1967 when performed by the Juilliard String Quartet. No piece on the album induces swoon as Gershwin's does once the bluesy tune exerts its seductive pull. The only still-living composer of the eleven, William Bolcom is represented by Graceful Ghost Rag (1970), a sweetly melodic and wistful folk-tinged setting. Piazzolla's Four, For Tango is instantly identifiable as the handiwork of the “nuevo tango” master, especially when it underscores its biting rhythms with percussive knocks and string flourishes. Javier Alvárez's Metro Chabacano (1988) refers to a Mexico City subway station and is joined by two others in the collective work Línea 2. As continuous eighth-note patterns lend Metro Chabacano an insistent propulsion that suggests a train's movement, short melodic phrases appear in turn to imbue the work with colour. After Joaquin Turina wrote the folk-inflected La oración del torero, Op 34 in collaboration with Quarteto Aguilar in 1925, he created a string quartet arrangement a year later. Inspired by a bullfight the composer attended in Madrid, Turina aspired to convey the contrast between the excitement of the spectacle itself and the anxiety felt by matadors about to put their lives on the line.

February 2024