Zehetmair Quartett KARL AMADEUS HARTMANN - BÉLA BARTÓK

Of the various non-Hungarian composers who drew musical sustenance from Bartok, none grew stronger, or more distinctive, than Munich-born Karl Amadeus Hartmann. The present coupling juxtaposes Bartok’s innovatory Fourth Quartet (1928) with a prize-winning quartet that Hartmann wrote in 1933. Hartmann’s mistily harmonised Langsam opening turns violent just before the four-minute mark. The muted second movement places the cellist centre-stage (Bartok does the same in the middle movement of his Fourth), while his finale – to be played con tutta forza – mirrors the high-octane of Bartok’s fifth movement. Both composers were significantly influenced by Berg’s Lyric Suite, a fact vividly reflected in their imaginative approaches to string sound per se. Hartmann’s language is introverted, questing, harmonically bold and economical. Not a note is wasted (it rarely is), and the performance under review could hardly be bettered. A first encounter made a strong impression, a second was even more fruitful and the work is already pulling rank in my memory bank alongside choice quartets by Bartok, Schoenberg, Janaeek and Shostakovich.
I’m told that the Zehetmair Quartet play their repertoire by heart, and you can sense spontaneous engagement in both works, especially in Bartok’s Fourth, where the trenchant opening Allegro is treated to an unusual (though never disfiguring) level of freedom. The entire performance has a distinctly improvisational feel to it, the finale in particular, which tears off at a terrific lick, yet stops short of excessive tenseness. I’d say that the Vegh Quartet’s later recording is the nearest point of reference, but as the coupling is unique – and most other versions come packed in with the other five quartets – direct comparisons aren’t strictly relevant.
One could, I suppose, baulk at the meagre 43-minute playing time, and yet with music as intense and demanding as this, it’s doubtful that even the most resilient listener would – or could – submit to ‘more of same’. Fine sound. (Gramophone)

Zehetmair Quartett ROBERT SCHUMANN

The Zehetmair Quartett, whose account of Hartmann and Bartók string quartets on their ECM debut was most enthusiastically received by the international press return with chamber music of Robert Schumann. With their uncanny sense for all the attributes of musical text, the quartet locate the emotional centre of these pieces even  as they illuminate the clarity of the musical architecture in their subtle  and lucid interpretations. In recent concerts, the Zehetmair Quartett has been playing Schumann alongside Bartók and Cage, making a case for the composer’s ‘modernity’, which is also evident in these readings.  As is now well-known, the Zehetmair group commits its repertoire to memory and often plays without music stands in concert, reaching thereby levels of inter-ensemble communication which the Glasgow Herald called “light years beyond close collaboration”. And in these Schumann performances  they also convey, vividly,  the sense of voices in dialogue, arguments worked out in the interplay of parts… (ECM Records)

Thomas Zehetmair / Ruth Killius MANTO AND MADRIGALS

Violinist Thomas Zehetmair and violist Ruth Killius have shared many years as musical collaborators in the Zehetmair quartet. The couple’s spectacular duo performance at last autumn’s ECM festival in Mannheim raised the expectactions for their new programme, a carefully composed anthology of contemporary pieces for violin and viola. Next to Bohuslav Martinů’s virtuosic and accessible “Madrigals”, written in 1946 in American exile, the central piece here is “Drei Skizzen” by Heinz Holliger, a triptychon with the instruments tuned in the scordatura of Mozart’s fomous “Sinfonia concertante” for violin, viola and orchestra. It was commissioned by the duo as an encore piece for their frequent renderings of Mozart’s masterworks on the concert platform. Its first movement “Pirouetts harmoniques” is entirely based on shimmering harmonics, whereas the second one is an exuberant perpetuum mobile. The cycle concludes with a six-part chorale that requires both string players to hum an extra voice. This idea, which is realised by the duo to a most stunning effect effect, was itself inspired by Giancinto Scelsi’s solo piece “Manto” for a “singing viola player”. The programme is complemented by compositions by Nikos Skalkottas, Béla Bartók and short pieces by Rainer Killius and Johannes Nied. (ECM Records)

GIYA KANCHELI Exil

Exil is dedicated to Manfred Eicher, the founder of the ECM label, to whom Kancheli paid such glowing tribute in his interview with SJ in last April's Gramophone. And this five-movement, 48-minute song-cycle is in many ways a true ECM piece – wholly contemporary in spirit, yet not excluding any listener with ears to hear and a soul to suffer. 

I suppose I should not be giving a puff for a recording company. Indeed some might counter by saying that music like Kancheli's, which increasingly wears its spirituality on its sleeve, is in danger of creating its own clique of New Age compassion-obsessed fellow-travellers. Certainly there is a danger that a concept such as that of Exil, so resonant in a world of multiple ethnic conflagrations, emotionally blackmails us into uncritical approval. But that would only be so if the music itself were deficient. All I can say is that I am immediately drawn in by the hovering, flute-timbred lines which make up the very discreet taped background to the first movement, a setting of Psalm 23. They are like melancholy calls over bleak mountains, and they return to punctuate and haunt the rest of the cycle. The very first chord which joins in, so familiar yet so elusive, has Kancheli's signature all over it. I love the way his microtonally divergent tape part can never quite be grasped by or reconciled to the 12 semitones (or more usually just plain diatonic triads) of the live instruments. I love the way the soprano and flutes shadow one another, diverge and coalesce. I love the uncanny balance Kancheli manages to strike between profound consolation and, as I hear it, even more profound inconsolability. Exemplary performances and recording make this a valuable addition to the discography of one of the precious voices in the music of our time. (Gramophone)

Zehetmair Quartett BÉLA BARTÓK - PAUL HINDEMITH

 Five years after their widely acclaimed recording of Béla Bartók’s fourth string quartet the Zehetmair quartet (in new line-up) play the Hungarian’s masterly fifth quartet, written in 1934, coupled with Paul Hindemith’s fourth from 1921 which is marked by a neo-classicist return to elaborate polyphony and baroque forms: landmarks of 20th century chamber music in interpretations of analytical clarity and emotional intensity.

The Zehetmair Quartet was founded in 1994. After its first tour in spring 1998 it received invitations to return from every concert organizer. Its annual European tours have been augmented by concerts in the United States (2001 and 2003) and Japan (2002). Highlights of 2004 were guest appearances at the Edinburgh Festival, the Helsinki Festival, and the Schleswig-Holstein Festival and in spring 2006 a highly successful tour took it to Vienna, Berlin, Cologne, Zurich, Madrid, Lisbon, Manchester, and other capitals. The four musicians also made guest appearances in Japan in February 2007.
In 2000 the Quartet made its ECM début with Bartók’s Fourth and Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s First, an album that won the quarterly German Record Critics’ Prize. Their 2004 release of Schumann quartets received Gramophone’s Record of the Year Award, the Diapason d’Or, the Edison Classical Music Award (Netherlands), and two Belgian awards: the Caecilia Prize and the Klara Prize for the year’s best international release.
Second violinist Kuba Jakowicz and cellist Ursula Smith joined the quartet in 2005. (ECM Records)

Zehetmair Quartett BEETHOVEN - BRUCKNER - HARTMANN - HOLLIGER

The Zehetmair Quartett, one of the most exciting and accomplished string quartets of our time, plays a programme of characteristically broad reach, extending from Beethoven to Holliger.
This 2-CD set is drawn from two recording sessions, both made at Zürich DRS studio. Beethoven’s F Major quartet, Bruckner’s C minor quartet and Holliger’s 2nd string quartet were recorded in April and May 2010. The Hartmann Nr. 2 was recorded in 2002 by an earlier quartet line-up, and this interpretation is previously unreleased. It was the last of the Zehetmair Quartett recordings to feature cellist and founding member Françoise Groben (1965–2011). “Her energy and creativity were crucial to our development and early successes, such as the Schumann CD. This new production is dedicated to her memory.”
The double album begins with Beethoven’s highly-concentrated opus 135. The last of Beethoven’s five quartets, written in 1826, it occupies a major position in what many feel to be a unified cycle. Wolfgang Sandner, in the liner notes: “Its traditional four-movement design, its moderate length, the absence of fugal writing and the classically Haydnesque or Mozartian sonata form of its opening movement all make it seem like a backward glance at the beginnings of the genre in Beethoven's music.” It is concentrated on the most essential elements, Thomas Zehetmair and Ruth Killius observe. But in its contrapuntal rigor, its thematic variety, its polyrhythms and energetic intervallic leaps it remains as challenging as any of Beethoven’s late quartets.
Bruckner’s C minor quartet, described by the performers as “touchingly warmhearted”, was written in 1862 as a student exercise when the composer was taking orchestration lessons from Otto Kitzler. The manuscript was rediscovered in 1950 in Munich and received its premiere there in 1951.
Hartmann’s second string quartet is in Zehetmair’s view, one of the 20th century’s most important quartets – “a large scale, nostalgic drama, full of wisdom”. Wolfgang Sandner: “The Second String Quartet is a piece of unmistakable consistency and rigour, a piece remarkable for its accuracy of statement, the weight it sets aside for each and every note, the balance it strikes between line and sonority, and especially its sense of formal architecture and awareness of a tradition stemming from Bach and convulsed by Beethoven. ... Above all it receives its ironclad structure from the Bachian counterpoint that Hartmann intensively studied, both in the original and in its impact on Anton Webern.”
Heinz Holliger’s Streichquartett Nr. 2 – described by Zehetmair as an “explosion of fantasy” – is at 24 minutes the longest work heard here, and it brings the Quartett’s programme to a powerful and event-packed conclusion. Commissioned for the Zehetmair group who premiered it in Cologne in 2008, the work is dedicated to Elliott Carter. The late US composer was fascinated by its texture, which treats the four instruments as a world of expressive sound in constant flux. Holliger admits that he returned to the string quartet format with considerable trepidation: “There is hardly another musical genre which is so burdened by its history as the string quartet. Whoever composes for this instrumentation inevitably senses the skeptical and critical stares of the great composers. This can have a paralyzing and intimidating effect. Perhaps this is the reason why I have only now dared to rise once more to the great challenge, 34 years after my much criticized 1st String Quartet.”