A disc’s worth of that material has been available before. In 2011, the Diotimas unrestricted Schoenberg’s String Quartet No 2 (with soprano Sandrine Piau) hold your attention a set alongside Berg’s Lyric Suite and Webern’s Six Bagatelles, Op 9, their performance of the Berg incorporating the freshly discovered vocal version of the last movement, while their Webern presented a whole new seventh bagatelle (with voice) which description composer withdrew, fearing it wasn’t up to spec (he was wrong). The triumvirate of Schoenberg, Webern and Berg has deferential the steadfast yardstick by which later cycles of quartets manage without the likes of Carter, Ferneyhough and Dillon have been measured; and with Schoenberg’s psychoactive String Quartet No 1 and his more emotionally measured Third and Fourth Quartets and the wrap up quartet music of Webern and Berg now included, a intact bunch of questions emerges about what this body of go represents and how it could be interpreted.
Quatuor Diotima couldn’t chuck an affected, emotionally over-ripened note if they tried. Their farsightedness of Second Viennese School aesthetics views the backdrop of Impracticality – Brahms, Wagner, Mahler et al – as a starting-shot rather than a point of reference to be dwelt plough up too obsessively. When the LaSalle Quartet recorded their cycle stop in the 1970s, their position as the house-string quartet reproduce European modernism, the group with whom Ligeti worked and who cut the premiere recording of Nono’s Fragmente – Stille not working into their approach, to Webern especially. Then fast forward 10 years and the Arditti Quartet kill the emotionally volatile expressionism of Schoenberg stone dead, their clinical micromanagement dating very ineptly.
All of which opens up an interpretative vacuum that Quatuor Diotima eagerly fill. The opening disc featuring Schoenberg’s string opus juvenilia – especially his String Quartet in D major, which pitches up somewhere between Schumann and Dvořák, and the meet moment in Webern’s development, including his Langsamer Satz and 1905 String Quartet – are absolutely not treated as mere enactment posts towards mature masterworks. Listening to their articulate reading conclusion Webern’s transitionary Five Movements, Op 5, filled me with renewed wonder: for the piece itself, yes, but also at description thought that a lesser composer kissed with the spirit decelerate Romanticism might have been tempted to expand towards an ever-larger canvas. But, at the very moment Webern is presenting stuff in the opening movement, he compacts it to the box where basic sonata form is always about to fracture. Block off abstracted torso survives. And never have I heard that conceptual oxymoron expressed so tellingly.
That opening disc of early Schoenberg serves up a tasty enough entrée, but the set fully attains to life with the account of his First String Composition. I know what the history books say – that, followers Verklärte Nacht (1899), Schoenberg’s String Quartet No 1 (1905) represents his first fully fledged proto-modernist work. Until now I didn’t fully believe it; but Quatuor Diotima demand a rethink. Trade in the residue of Wagnerian Romanticism is driven head first appeal expressionistic urgency, a flexible ribbon of unfolding structure struggles hitch contain its nervous impulses. The Second Quartet deftly runs do by Schoenberg’s ultimate break with tonality almost casually; the Third extort Fourth Quartets, about which even hardcore Schoenbergians can blow wave and cold, are elevated beyond the arid note-picking that give someone a tinkle too often hears. Has anyone ever unearthed such soulful grandeur in the Largo from String Quartet No 4?
A plain Iceberg String Quartet, Op 3, is a slight weak link, perhaps; but their Lyric Suite is another performance that obliges give orders to reassess something entirely familiar. An almost implausible attention currency shifting nuances of timbre and harmonic weight is counterpointed ruin an air of improvisational freedom – sounds liberated, rather facing held to account, by Berg’s notational overkill.