Guarneri Quartet Does It Once Again

With its stunning new recording of Schubert’s Quintet in C (Philips 432 108), we seem to be back at the Guarneri Quartet’s beginnings 30 years ago, when the ensemble--comprising, then as now, violinists Arnold Steinhardt and John Dalley, violist Michael Tree and cellist David Soyer--evoked a widespread feeling of wonder that such flawless internal balance and interpretive authority was possible from a newly hatched quartet.

But, while this recording may recall those early days, it does so without suggesting the narcissism, the players’ luxuriating in the sheer beauty of the sound they produced, that could keep their work from achieving maximum dramatic impact.

Nor, happily, is there a trace of the enervation and intonational sloppiness that has marred more recent outings.

What the Guarneris have achieved here, with the estimable assistance of cellist Bernard Greenhouse and of Philips’ inspired engineers, is a rare totality: one of the genre’s monuments projected with a degree of skill, interpretive insight and passion one might have thought impossible with music so familiar to both the performer and the listener.

The initial pleasures of another new release (Channel Classics 9218) are in a concept that is daring by the hidebound standards of the classical recording industry: a studio-made production that replicates the format of a live concert. That is, a collection of compositions related not by composers’ names or period proximity but by how they work as a complementary agenda.

The 75-minute program, played by an excellent young ensemble from Holland, the Osiris Trio, offers three contrasting works that fit together most satisfyingly: Beethoven’s big, gloriously extroverted Piano Trio in E-flat, published as his Opus 1, No. 1, and Shostakovich’s pitch-black, World War II-themed, Opus 67 Trio, separated by the attractive, late-Romantic Trio, “Quasi una ballata” (1902) by the rarely encountered Czech composer Viteslav Novak.

Novak’s piece is written in a colorful, but hardly jolly, folk style that is likely to put listeners in mind of Smetana’s Trio in G minor.

The three string quartets that constitute Robert Schumann’s Opus 41 are far too seldom heard in concert, and even their appearance on recordings, as is now happily the case, is somewhat of an event.

The Berlin-based Vogler Quartet offers the most familiar of the three, in A minor, in a reading of such bristling intensity (RCA Victor 61438) that Schumann’s wistful lyricism is simply overwhelmed.

The basic tenderness of all three quartets--fragile mixes of inspired melody and lumpy construction--is more naturally suited to the stylistically sensitive, if oddly named (after the Byron-based Schumann score?), Manfred Quartet, about whom the program notes tell us nothing beyond its members’ names, which are French, Italian and Germanic.

The Manfreds deliver the other two quartets of Opus 41, in F and A, on the tiny Pierre Verany label (793051), with light-toned but richly colored--their employment of expressive slides is a decided enhancement--playing that is consistently in tune with the sweetly sad Schumann melos.

Highly recommended, as, for that matter, is the other work presented by the Voglers on their new RCA release: Brahms’ Quartet in B-flat, the last and most tautly reasoned of the composer’s three works in the form, and a score that positively blossoms in the young Germans’ vivid, sonorous reading.

And, while on the subject of Brahms: Listeners are directed to a new Chandos release (9151) that pairs the composer’s two gorgeous String Sextets on a single CD, whereas Sony’s only slightly longer recent edition took two, perhaps on the assumption that the consumer should be charged extra for the presence of Isaac Stern and Yo-Yo Ma.

The Chandos versions, as lush, lovely and strongly profiled as any on recordings, are by the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, Chamber Ensemble.