Guarneri in the 20th Century: a Modest Proposal

As most readers will probably expect by now, my journey through the 49 CDs in the Sony Masterworks box set Guarneri Quartet: The Complete Recordings 1965–2005 concludes in the twentieth century. I must confess that I was more than a little disappointed at how modest this repertoire was. There are only four CDs, three of which are devoted to Hungarian composers. The one “outlier” is the French album, which consists of the usual coupling of the only quartets composed by Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, respectively. These are satisfying accounts, but it would be fair to say that they do not rise above the many past listening experiences I have devoted to both of these French quartets.

Photograph of Ernst von Dohnányi, probably taken around 1905 (photographer unknown, public domain, from Wikimedia Commons)

The Hungarian side accounts for all six of the quartets composed by Béla Bartók. The remaining CD is sort of a “sandwich.” Zoltán Kodály’s Opus 10 (second) quartet is situated between the last two of the string quartets by Ernst von Dohnányi: Opus 15 in D-flat major and Opus 33 in A minor. Now those readers that have been following this site for some time may recall that my association of the complete canon of the Bartók quartets with the Juilliard String Quartet goes all the way back to my freshman year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a result, for better or worse, the three CDs in the Sony Classical anthology, Juilliard String Quartet: The Early Columbia Recordings 1949–56, have long served as my “gold standard.”

Mind you, I fondly appreciated the opportunity to listen to music by both Kodály and Dohnányi, simply because I encounter their works so seldom. However, Columbia released two different albums of the Bartók quartets (the second in stereo, to “compensate” for the first monaural version); and I gave both of those interpretations a generous amount of attention during my campus radio station days. Now Sony is responsible for recordings that were first released by both Columbia and RCA, responsible for both Juilliard and Guarneri, respectively. So I have a generous number of opportunities to enjoy Bartók’s quartets (including the Complete Edition of the composer’s music on Hungaroton); and I have every intention of giving equal attention to all of these sources in future listening encounters!