The Strad Issue: May 2017
Description: Polarised choice of repertoire yields wide-ranging results
Musicians: Armida Quartet
Composer: Beethoven, Shostakovich
Catalogue Number: AVI-MUSIC 8553368
Having made crisp and freshly minted recordings of Mozart, Ligeti and Bartók, this young German ensemble (winner of the ARD Competition in 2012) has turned to pillars of the old and new testaments of quartet literature, with mixed results.
The vivacity and grace of the ensemble’s earlier Mozart would have suited the scherzo of Beethoven’s first ‘Rasumovsky’. Here, jabbing accents, skittering runs and choppy phrasing mark an unremittingly tense, even nervy approach to a work that takes †¨on the blood-red shade of a Macbeth-scaled tragedy. There is much effective use of non-vibrato colours in the abrupt transitions of the first movement’s development and the ringing purity of the Adagio’s first theme, but no sense of the clouds lifting into the finale.
The Armida’s slightly desiccated tone is better suited to Shostakovich’s Tenth Quartet. The ensemble catches exactly the wan smile of the ambivalent first movement and the dry, brittle humour of the second without recourse to pathos. A mature awareness of the intimate address needed for a studio microphone is evident throughout, but especially in the dynamic contrasts and stoic nobility of the Adagio, led by MartinuFunda with the kind of supple and sympathetic melodic phrasing that would have been welcome in the Beethoven.
Peter Quantrill
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