Adorno Quartet: Castelnuovo-Tedesco

The Strad Issue: August 2024

Description: Perceptive readings make the case for a neglected quartet byway

Musicians: Adorno Quartet

Works: Castelnuovo-Tedesco: Complete String Quartets

Catalogue number: NAXOS 8574580

Maybe best remembered for his substantial contribution to the guitar repertoire and his exile in California, earlier in his life, Mario Castelnuovo-Tesdesco was regarded as one of the bright lights of Italian music, studying with Pizzetti, and taken under the wing of Casella. His First Quartet, written in Italy in 1929, is dappled with sunlight: you can almost see the blue skies and feel the warm breezes wafting through the light textures. He forges an immediately winning, strongly melodious and tonal style with excellent and crystal-clear part writing. All these ingredients are impressively highlighted by the Adorno Quartet, which is alert to nuance within the musical line, as well as mustering appealing warmth, varied timbres and strikingly transparent musical dialogues.

Castelnuovo-Tedesco fled Italy in 1939 after Mussolini passed racial laws excluding Jews from cultural life. Almost a decade later, he returned home and wrote his Second Quartet. The mood is darker and more reflective, with a sense of inevitable personal loss reflected in the musical invention. Nonetheless, his style retains a taut level of compositional working, lucidly conveyed here, with a recording that has both bloom and clarity. Both these works, as well as the sparkling Third Quartet, are world-premiere recordings, and serve to shine a light on a composer worth far more investigation, especially given these idiomatic and sensitive interpretations.

JOANNE TALBOT