My writing about the new Sony Classical anthology, Juilliard String Quartet: The Early Columbia Recordings 1949–56, got off to a rocky start because so many of the sixteen CDs in the collection involve the ensemble “sharing space” with other unrelated performers. Most of those recordings were part of Columbia’s Modern American Music Series, which accounted for seven of the CDs in the set. Fortunately, among the eight remaining CDs, only one (which happens to be the very first in the box) involves similar sharing. I shall postpone it until my final article, which involves an “everything else” category. First, however, I wish to devote two articles to two “all-Juilliard” categories.
This article will be devoted to the very first set of recordings the quartet made of the six string quartets composed by Béla Bartók. This will be followed by a discussion of the Columbia recordings devoted to the Second Viennese School. According to a Gramophone article that I read online, the Juilliard Quartet recorded the Bartók cycle three times.
The Sony anthology accounts for the three long-playing (LP) albums that were released in 1950, recorded by the founding members of the quartet: violinists Robert Mann and Robert Koff, violist Raphael Hillyer, and cellist Arthur Winograd. By the time of the second release in 1963, Winograd had been replaced by Claus Adam. More importantly, at least from Columbia’s point of view, these LPs were stereophonic. The third collection was released in 1981; and this time the “technical advance” was the shift from analog to digital recording technology. The only founding member still in the quartet was its leader, Mann. The other performers were violinist Isidore Cohen, violist Samuel Rhodes, and cellist Joel Krosnick.
At this point I would like to lapse into a bit of autobiography. As a freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, my “spare time” was spent at the campus radio station (then WTBS), where I produced and hosted a program entitled Music of the Twentieth Century. One day one of the upper class-men in my dormitory came to tell me that we were going to a free concert by the Juilliard at Sanders Theatre in Harvard University’s Memorial Hall. This was my first encounter with a chamber music recital, and the quartet membership was that of the 1963 Bartók recording. (My freshman year began in September of 1963.) The program included the fifth Bartók quartet, and I was hooked over the course of all five of its movements. When the finale was “invaded” by the most insipid melody one could imagine, it was all I could do to contain myself.
Then and there I knew that I wanted to do radio programs about the full cycle of the quartets. Since the WTBS record collection did not include them, I was able to borrow them from the campus library. These were the three LPs that had been released in 1950. While in the Music Library, I also checked out the six scores. Over the course of three broadcasts, I played all six of the quartets, preceded by my own oral program notes based on my score-reading. Not long after that, I invested in the 1963 box set.
I offer this digression because listening the three Sony CDs in the new release was very much a trip down Memory Lane. If I may be allowed a Yiddishism (Oxford calls it “informal North American,” but what do they know?), I realized that each of those quartets had at least one passage that made me kvell. To be fair, I have not yet heard any of the performances from the 1981 album; but, by that time, listening to the Juilliard was not as exciting as it had been when I was younger. (On the other hand, Mann was a regular visitor to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music; and I relished every opportunity I had to observe his master classes and listen to recitals at which he performed with the students.)
These days, however, is seems as if quartets are more interested in “owning” the full scope of the string quartets by Ludwig van Beethoven. Mind you, as a listener, I am always curious about how that “ownership” is realized in performance. However, for all of the different ways in which listening to Beethoven engages the mind, those six Bartók quartets also have no end of capacity for engagement; and I wish I had more opportunities to revisit those quartets in recital performances.
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