Hanson Quartet: Schumann

The Strad Issue: September 2024

Description: Plenty of accomplishment on display as a quartet makes its label debut

Musicians: Hanson Quartet; Adam Laloum (piano)

Works: Schumann: Three String Quartets op.41. Piano Quintet in E flat major

Catalogue number: HARMONIA MUNDI HMM90 2726/27 (2 CDs)

I remarked in the June issue on the way Schumann’s chamber music has, over the past quarter-century or so, become a major attraction for new and emerging ensembles. Now here comes the Hanson Quartet in the group’s Harmonia Mundi debut and only its second recording (following Haydn on Aparté in 2019).

You immediately hear how at home these players are in Schumann’s world, the studied vulnerability of the First Quartet’s introduction giving way to a confidence that demonstrates long acquaintance with this music. Counterpoint, which saturates so much of Schumann’s chamber output, is cleanly dispatched, while slow music is poised and polished, and intensity is maintained whether in the chromatic contortions of, say, the First’s Adagio or the hesitant variations of the Third’s Assai agitato.

All that is perhaps missing is the last ounce of devilry, of the dynamism that is revealed so readily in the modern benchmark recording by the Doric Quartet (Chandos). The Hanson does, though, score over the Doric in including the long second repeat in the finale of the Second Quartet. That said, the Hanson’s tempos are almost uniformly less driven than the Doric’s, often markedly so, tempering some of the wildness of Schumann’s mood-shifts, though the assurance of these accounts is impressive.

The set is completed with the Piano Quintet for which Adam Laloum joins the quartet. Everything is executed with accomplishment but the virtuoso extroversion is underplayed. Come for the quartets, perhaps go elsewhere for the quintet.

DAVID THREASHER