Several years ago, Quatuor Turner taped a wildly unconventional and thrilling survey of Beethoven’s Op. 18 quartets as its debut release on Harmonia Mundi’s Les Nouveaux Interprètes series. Now the Turners are back, this time playing the Op. 74 “Harp” quartet and the last of the Razumovskys with similarly iconoclastic force, in performances that are constantly alive to the structural demands of the music. By coincidence, Op. 74 (with Opp. 95 and 135) was recently recorded by the British Eroica Quartet for Harmonia Mundi, and comparisons between the two are revealing.
With the Turners, you’ll get playing that’s more urgently incisive. But this bristling ferocity comes at a price, and there are moments when the Turners don’t match their rivals’ tonal refinement, nor do they explore the textural subtleties of the music so effectively. A key instance comes in Op. 74’s mysterious preface to its first movement, where the Eroicas observe dynamics more astutely. But what grips the imagination so completely with the Turner performance is the way the players highlight dynamic and expressive contrasts: the portentous Adagio shocks and chills after the exaltation of the opening allegro and the six variations of the finale also are fully characterized.
Beethoven’s sketches for the moto-perpetuo finale of the C major Razumovsky were inscribed, “let your deafness no longer be a secret, even in your art”, and this courageous personal resolve and heroism is highly palpable in Quatuor Turner’s exceptionally committed reading. There are many superb recordings of this quartet, but on period instruments the Turner Quartet seems unrivalled, and the recorded sound is outstanding.
