Smetana: String Quartets Nos. 1 and 2, From My Homeland

Franova, Tatjana, Moyzes Quartet, Nishizaki, Takako

8.550379

You do not need to know that No. 1 has a story-telling element in order to enjoy and appreciate a work that follows the tradition of Schubert in many ways: there are echoes in the harmony, in the static, brooding music of the opening and in the vigorous outbursts at the centre of the first movement. Smetana’s personal voice is clear in his turns of phrase and in the tight, foreshortened qualities of his large-scale forms. At the end, the reassembly and transformation of themes from earlier in the quartet is a practice that became increasingly common in 19th-century music after the symphonic poems and piano concertos of Liszt. He wrote the quartet at the end of 1876, some two years after the deafness had struck, and it was first performed in March 1879.
The second quartet dates from 1882-83, when he had great difficulty in keeping up sustained work - his doctor had in fact told him not to compose at all for the time being, and not even to read for more than a quarter of an hour. Again there is a dimension of personal history, though a less specific one, relating to his state of psychological turbulence. It is hard to see how things could have been otherwise: themes emerge impulsively and alternate rather than interact or develop, and if the first quartet was sometimes elliptical in character the second is positively gnomic. Its most extended movement is the single relatively easy-going one, another polka, this time interspersed with calls like the Flying Dutchman’s and a slow, singing central section.
But the rest proceeds in alternations of fast and slow, in epigrammatic utterances and occasional flights of tenderness or passion. Nominally in D minor, it spends most of its first few minutes establishing itself with increasing certainty in F major, then in the finale it reverses the process, with the D turning major for a lively conclusion. The quartet had its first performance in January 1884.

CD x 1

Naxos

05.02.92

4891030503793