Telegraph Quartet: Divergent Paths: Schoenberg & Ravel
Azica Records

My first exposure to a recording of Ravel's String Quartet in F Major occurred when the Melos Quartett coupled it with Debussy's string quartet on the group's 1979 Deustsche Grammophon release—as complementary a pairing of works as might possibly be imagined. Such a natural choice of bedfellows makes The Telegraph Quartet's (Eric Chin and Joseph Maile, violins; Pei-Ling Lin, viola; Jeremiah Shaw, cello) pairing of Ravel's first and only string quartet with Schoenberg's String Quartet No. 1 in D minor, Op. 7 seem all the more striking by comparison. Recorded in July 2022 at St. Stephens Episcopal Church in Belvedere, California, the Telegraph Quartet's seventy-two-minute release (the group's second) is, as far as its members know, the first time the two have appeared on the same album.

The contrast between Ravel's refined creation and Schoenberg's thornier one is pronounced, so much so it's tempting, especially when on one side there's structural order and on the other seeming wildness, to consider the works in Apollonian and Dionysian terms. Despite their differences, they were created at almost the same time—Ravel's during 1902-03 and Schoenberg's 1904-05—by artists whose birth dates also concur, the Austrian-American composer born in 1874 and his French counterpart a year later. Each work embraces the traditional four-movement format; Schoenberg's, however, eschews the clear separation of Ravel's for parts that flow without pause, the result a forty-six-minute colossus. Divergent Paths is an entirely apt title for works that differ so dramatically, even if their creators' lives parallel one another in certain ways.

While Ravel's expression does conform to traditional string quartet form—an opening allegro followed by scherzo, adagio, and spirited finale—and is emblematic of the tone of French Impressionism, it's also radical for how it includes within its writing modal scales and echoes of music from other countries. The poetic elegance of Satie and Debussy is present, but Ravel also extends his material into daring other realms. Further to that, his quartet projects a poised, cerebral character, yet it's also sinuous, seductive, and sensual. As Kai Christiansen observes in liner notes, the work is also marked by cyclic form, themes that recur within the work to help unify it and establish connections between the movements. In this case, melodic figures in the opening movement re-appear in slightly altered form throughout.

The Telegraph Quartet's rendering of the opening movement is meticulous in its attention to detail and nuanced in its handling of dynamics, pacing, and texture. With one aromatic melody arising after another, Ravel's music breathes serenely at one moment, grows agitated the next. The pizzicati and tremolo dimensions of the second moment give it immediate character and enhance its alluring quality; offsetting the liveliness of the opening minutes is a lilting, dream-like episode that's as riveting. If the delicate slow movement offers ample opportunity to bask in the sensitivity of the ensemble's playing, the rousing finale is at times so frenetic one rushes to catch one's breath.

Schoenberg's quartet anticipates the bold directions his music (and that of his students Alban Berg and Anton Webern) would later take. Mercurial in the extreme, the quartet oscillates between fast and slow tempi and dissonance and consonance, never staying in one place for long and testifying to its creator's restless temperament. Yet as unlike Ravel's as Schoenberg's is, it shares with it a concern for thematic unity between its sections (even if they appear as an uninterrupted continuum) and a similar sonata-like form (allegro, scherzo, adagio, rondo). Here too themes voiced early on recur, albeit transformed. They're challenging to discern, however, when Schoenberg's polyphonic entwining of the instruments' patterns is often ultra-dense. That said, it's easy to detect melodic similarities to Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4 (1899) in the quartet, in its agitated opening theme, for example. Interestingly, both works begin in D Minor and end in D Major, and a distinctly romantic flavour permeates them too, if one more floridly expressed in the earlier setting. There are turbulent moments, but as the string quartet's closing movements show, haunting ones also, and the hush that's slowly reached as the work nears its lyrical end is exquisite too. In unfolding without pause, the work begins to take on the character of an odyssey or emotionally expansive tone poem.

September 2023