String quartets playing on “authentic” instruments today face a most inauthentic situation. Performers in Haydn’s day had a simple goal: make as beautiful a sound as possible. For modern quartets, if beauty of tone isn’t quite “beside the point” (as Hindemith put it), it’s certainly not more important than showing off their purported “authenticity” by sounding as different as possible from today’s norms. This means tolerating all kinds of screechy, scratchy, grinding noises that I suspect sounded as ugly to Haydn and his contemporaries as they do to us. Having just endured The London Haydn Quartet’s excruciating evisceration of Haydn’s Op. 9 on Hyperion, these issues have been uppermost in my mind of late.
The fact is, it’s possible to play the violin on a period instrument and sound beautiful above the staff, as first violinist Alida Schat shows on this disc. In the first-movement exposition of Op. 20 No. 3, or the gorgeous Adagio sostenuto of Op. 76, her tone actually becomes sweeter the higher it goes. Indeed, the entire ensemble manages to sound at once earthy, as in the finale of Op. 74, as well as elegant (has the conclusion of Op. 76 ever sounded more winsome?), encompassing the full expressive range that Haydn built into the music. Their tempo choices are also infallibly right–lively in the allegros but always allowing for characterful phrasing and that sense of suprise so typical of Haydn. In short, this is one of the best recordings of Haydn quartets on period instruments currently available, and the sound, as we have come to expect from this label, is state-of-the art in all formats. [12/10/2007]
