Quatuor Ébène Launches “Global” Beethoven Project

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed

This past October Erato released the first album by Quatour Ébène in a series entitled Beethoven Around the World. The French ensemble is marking the 250th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven with a global tour of 21 countries. Over the course of that tour, they plan to make live concert recordings of the entire canon of Beethoven’s string quartets. The cities in which these recordings will be made will be Vienna, Philadelphia, Tokyo, São Paulo, Melbourne, Nairobi, and Paris.

The first recordings were made in the Mozartsaal of the Konzerthaus in Vienna in June of 2019. They were made over the course of two days, capturing both rehearsals and performance. The program consisted of the first two of the Opus 59 (“Razumovsky”) quartets, the first in F major and the second in E minor.

It is probably worth emphasizing that Beethoven Around the World is not about learning to play the full canon while visiting 21 countries around the world. It would be reasonable to assume that Ébène had a solid command of all sixteen quartets (as well as the Opus 133 “Große Fuge”) before this tour had even begun its planning stages. It is only the recording project that is “global;” and, if these recordings are edited amalgams of rehearsals and performances, then the results may not even be a faithful document of how Beethoven was played to audiences around the world. If we then take into account how many recordings already exist of the complete string quartet canon, one would not be out of line to wonder whether the trip (recording the traversal of the canon, rather than the decision to perform for audiences around the world) is necessary.

From a personal point of view, I already have several recordings of the full canon and a generous assortment of recorded performances of many of the individual quartets. I have also had an even more generous share of opportunities to listen to these quartets in performance; and I continue to have fond memories of the now-disbanded Cypress String Quartet, which provided many of those opportunities. What I have learned from all of those experiences is that no recording, no matter how expertly captured and edited, provides an adequate substitute for a recital experience. So much of any of the scores underscores the virtues of the immediacy of performance, even if (or particularly) when such immediacy may introduce an element of risk, whether the risk involves just getting the notes right, shaping them with the right intonation, or phrasing awkward passages as if they make all the sense in the world.

I feel I can support this case with evidence from my last encounter with Ébène in recital. It was a performance of the E minor (second) “Razumovsky” quartet performed in Herbst Theatre under the auspices of San Francisco Performances. The next morning I found myself writing about “the sheer wonder of the power of … extended duration.” The performance had been an edge-of-your-seat experience; and I cherished every minute of it. It almost goes without saying that such intense immediacy rarely (if ever) plays out on a recorded artifact. Without sounding too egocentric, I think the lesson is that I would rather be reminded of an intense personal experience by revisiting my own descriptive words than by hoping that the same lightning would strike in a recording of the same ensemble playing the same music.