A revealing juxtaposition of old and new from this adventurous quartet
The Strad Issue: March 2025
Description: A revealing juxtaposition of old and new from this adventurous quartet
Musicians: Kuss Quartet, Maurice Steger (recorder)
Works: Schubert: String Quartet no.14 ‘Death and the Maiden’. Andre: Seven Pieces for string quartet. Ter Schiphorst: Sei gutes Muts
Catalogue number: RUBICON RCD1104
A (vocal) whisper, a thud and a display of extended techniques open Iris ter Schiphorst’s Sei gutes Muts – a response to Death’s words to the Maiden in Schubert’s song: ‘Be of good cheer’. The quartet is joined by recorder player Maurice Steger, who responds with a panoply of overblows, breath-tones, flutters and all manner of sounds evoking the horror of the other side.
Marc Andre’s Seven Pieces take another route into the void: barely-there sounds, existing for the most part at the threshold of audibility, and in regions of string technique that would have lain far outside Schubert’s ken. A detailed recording in the Andreaskirche on the banks of the Wannsee, south-west of Berlin, ensures that not the slightest tick or twitter is missed.
Schubert, too, operated at the limits of string technique: at the first read-through of the 14th Quartet, Ignaz Schuppanzigh pronounced its opening movement unplayable. There can hardly have been a quartet before this one with such a brutal, abrupt opening, or such dangerous beauty as the slow-movement variations. Perhaps the Kuss Quartet mitigates the shock and awe of that opening with agogic silences and the artful shaping of its augmented return.
The rhetorical contours of the Kuss’s Andante continually draw the ear, though, and these musicians maintain impressive tension right up to the close of the finale’s inexorable Totentanz. If I hankered after greater warmth of tone, Schubert’s power to shock remains undiminished.
DAVID THREASHER
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