Aside from some impressive note-spinning, the Hagen Quartet takes a clinically detached, rather perfunctory view of Dvorák’s A-flat major quartet Op. 105. What’s needed here is a sense of personal involvement in the music, though much of this reading suggests detailed study of the score. Such evidence is clear from the way the Hagens chart their way through the densely textured Adagio slow introduction to the opening movement, and in the watchful dynamic gradations in the slow movement. But as with so many of their recordings of standard repertory, this one is too controlled and sterile to really take flight. The expansive finale goes well enough, but the idiomatic weakness of this account is all too clear when it’s considered beside the fine Artis Quartet performance on Sony. The Artis have a more spontaneously impulsive approach, so they’re often living dangerously–as in the scherzo, which, although taken at a faster tempo than the Hagens, never shows any lack of clarity in instrumental dialogue.
But the Hagen Quartet, which so often disappoints in mainstream literature, also can excel in 20th century works, as it does here, in strongly characterized accounts of Erwin Schulhoff’s Five Pieces for String Quartet and Gyorgy Kurtág’s 12 Microludes. Heard after the Dvorák, such strident modernity and ruthless exploitation of novel timbres and sonorities are startling, and this disc will pay dividends if your listening tastes are adventurous. But for a gripping and fiery reading of Dvorák’s Op. 105, logically coupled with Smetana’s Quartet No. 1 “From My Life”, the Artis Quartet’s Sony disc is the more rewarding choice.
