Arcadia Quartet: Weinberg

The Strad Issue: August 2024

Description: Great commitment characterises this evolving quartet cycle

Musicians: Arcadia Quartet

Works: Weinberg: String Quartets, vol.4: nos. 6, 13 and 15

Catalogue number: CHANDOS CHAN20281

Trauma of persecution scarred Weinberg’s creativity, lending his quartets a veiled melancholy fully captured by the Arcadia Quartet in these beautifully engineered recordings. Having fled the Nazi occupation of his native Poland, and losing many members of his family, Weinberg found himself walking a tightrope to stay on the right side of the Soviet regime. Despite that, the Sixth Quartet fell foul of the authorities during the Stalin era, and was banned due to its perceived advanced musical language. Each of its six movements is strongly characterised, elements of klezmer interspersed with more sombre material. The Arcadia Quartet exploits its varying moods to maximum effect.

Structurally, all of Weinberg’s music is closely worked, ideas linked and contrapuntal voices weaving in and out of the textures. The single-movement no.13 relies on careful contrasts to propel it forward. The Arcadia Quartet is alert to this, using rubato and extreme dynamics to intensify expression. By the time of the Quartet no.15, Weinberg had become a no-holds-barred modernist. The invention is spare and stark, grittily atonal and bleak, to which the Arcadia responds with a wide palette of colours within its darker shades.

In this fourth volume the Arcadia Quartet triumphantly demonstrates how at home it is in Weinberg’s world, in readings that balance precision and heart.

JOANNE TALBOT