The Most Beautiful Sounds Next to Silence

Haydn considered this work, originally an orchestral piece interspersed with appropriate Gospel readings and sermons, one of his most successful. So successful in fact that he later made a number of arrangements of it, not least of which was this present version for string quartet, a setting that he felt would help the work’s greater dissemination. Surely this was a desirable step in his own time, but today we can pick and choose between available recordings of the different arrangements, and this particular performance by the Rosamunde Quartett makes me yearn for the rich vibrancy of the orchestral version as realized by Jordi Savall’s Concert des Nations. Although the scale of the two ensembles is quite different, the Rosamunde’s reading is nevertheless disappointing, a landscape colored entirely beige.

The fact that the quartet plows through the work (a slow introduction followed by seven slow movements) uninterrupted by any pronouncement of spoken text might even enhance the work’s meditative quality (though Haydn himself feared that a succession of similarly paced movements would be hard on the listeners). But, as technically assured as these players are, there’s never a sense that they’re really digging into the emotional core of the score, or taking advantage of the piece’s fabulous melodic inventiveness. In one of Haydn’s most contemplative works, their playing offers a very odd sensation of disembodiment, of skimming over the notes. I’m not saying that the whole piece should be dirge-like–far from it; but here there is no feeling of gravitas that might suit a Lenten work. Weirdly, the last movement is even further removed from the score: “Il Terremeto [The Earthquake]” merely plods. If there were ever a real tremor to match the Rosamunde’s portrayal, it wouldn’t even merit a rating on the Richter scale. On the strongly positive side: The sound is excellent. Too bad the interpretation isn’t.

(https://www.classicstoday.com)