Franz Schubert : String Quartets (Quatuors à cordes) D.87 & D.887

Album review

Spain's Cuarteto Casals, like its namesake, has a passionate but not especially Romantic style, with a big sound, clean attacks, and daring approaches to large-scale structure. They're always impressive, but perhaps never have their talents been so effectively deployed as in this release pairing one of Franz Schubert's very early quartets with his last one, the String Quartet in G major, D. 887, written in 1826. Even in the early String Quartet in E flat major, D. 87, composed when Schubert was 16, the group is exceptional. Published in 1830, this quartet was misdated in the 19th century and thought to be from much later in Schubert's career. The Cuarteto Casals' performance is one of the few to get to why. Even the booklet notes rather undervalue the work, which is full of small surprises like the duple-meter trio of the Scherzo, and a certain restless quality that captures Schubert's ambition and puts the work properly in a realm with the big early songs. The G major quartet here is truly shattering, with the agonized opening and large, misshapen first movement splaying out into the piece-long uncertain alternation between G major and G minor and reaching hair-trigger tension with some almost atonal exclamations in the slow movement. The booklet annotator, along with many other commentators, likens the work to the String Quintet in C major, D. 956, but actually it's a different and altogether more emotionally painful piece. This too the Cuarteto Casals gets. Harmonia Mundi's engineers, working in Teldex Studios in Berlin, opt for an intense, hard sound, close up but not over the edge. It's perfect, and it rounds out an extraordinary release.
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