Ravel & La Tombelle: String Quartets

Album review

Founded in 1983 by German siblings, the Mandelring Quartett has recorded extensively. It has produced complete works and anthologies that (perhaps for the time being) avoid Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven and concentrate on Schubert, Shostakovich, Mendelssohn, Onslow, Goldschmidt, Brahms and Janáček.

In this new album, they wisely include Maurice Ravel's famous Quartet in F alongside the only piece of its kind composed by Fernand de La Tombelle, written seven years before the work by his younger brother. Long one of the vast crowd of those forgotten by the history of music, La Tombelle (1854-1928) was one of the founders of the Schola Cantorum in Paris alongside Vincent d'Indy. A movement of rediscovery, largely initiated by the Bru Zane Foundation in Venice, has been taking place in recent years around this prolific composer who was curious about everything from poetry to astronomy, photography, the plastic arts and gastronomy.

His Quartet in E major, part of the French quartet revival with those of Vincent d'Indy, Chausson and Albéric Magnard, is a welcome discovery. La Tombelle's language, clearly inherited from the German composers of the 19th century, is that of a cultivated and humanist aristocrat, oscillating between classicism and modernity. The overwhelming sunlight emanating from the young Ravel's pure diamond can illuminate this rare work and at the same time overshadow it, depending on one's tastes, but the risk was worth taking. © François Hudry/Qobuz