Tippett: String Quartets vol.1

Michael Tippett, who was ‘invincibly drawn to the quartet medium’ when he heard performances by the Busch and Léner Quartets during his student years in London, wrote five string quartets spanning his entire compositional life. On this first disc of the complete Quartets, the tuneful String Quartet No. 1 is followed by the String Quartet No. 2, notable for its abundant lyricism and lithe, dancing rhythms. In sharp contrast to both these works stands the more dissonantString Quartet No. 4, an unbroken sequence of numbered movements, which reflect the String Quartet Op. 131 of Tippett’s compositional hero, Beethoven.

Review

Tippett Quartet finding lyricism in their namesake

Tippett himself coached the Lindsay Quartet (as it was then called) for its recording of his first three quartets (ASV) and wrote the last two for the same players. How much the composer became swept away by the big, bold and energetic style that characterized the Lindsay’s playing is questioned by this first disc of a complete cycle from the young Tippett Quartet.

If in the 1970s the Lindsay was pointing to the music’s modernity, the Tippett has the luxury now of looking backwards to find a greater degree of lyricism in this music, whose roots hark back to Beethoven. Technically the players rise to the many challenges made by the composer, at times with more certainty than the Lindsay, and we arrive at the finale of the Fourth Quartet before needing to question the security of intonation.

Though in general the Tippett players display an ample dynamic range, they take a more intimate view of the First Quartet, and soften moments of acerbity in the scoring. If tempos generally show little variance from those used by the Lindsay, the Tippett does employ a more urgent pulse in the second movement of both nos. 1 and 2, and in so doing gives a more purposeful shape to the music.

Those two scores come from when the composer was relatively young, but by the time he reached the Fourth Quartet in 1978 there is more aggression and dissonance, and from the start the music plunges into a conflict that extends through much of the score. The Tippett Quartet stops short of the Lindsay’s frenetic take on the finale; the music is marked ‘very fast’, though the composer was probably looking for an atmosphere that was verging on turmoil.

A scrupulously clean and clearly recorded disc.

The Strad, David Denton