Tippett Quartet Takes on Korngold Quartets

Cover design for the album being discussed (courtesy of Naxos of America)

A little over a month ago, Naxos released the latest CD to account for the three string quartets composed by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. (According to Amazon there is a generous number of options for performances of this particular genre in the Korngold catalog.) The performances are by the Tippett Quartet, whose members are violinists John Mills and Jeremy Isaac, violist Lydia Lowndes-Northcott, and cellist Bozidar Vukotic. The recording sessions took place in Essex (in England) early in November of 2021, suggesting an early sign of emergence from the COVID pandemic.

Each of the three quartets establishes a different “milestone” in Korngold’s career as a composer. Taken in the context of what many other composers were doing (particularly in Vienna), it is worth noting that all three of the quartets are unabashedly tonal. He began work on the first quartet (Opus 16 in A major) in 1922, about a couple of years after he had composed his Opus 12 three-act opera Die tote Stadt (the dead city). One might even assume that the interval allowed for a shift away from the sharper edges of the opera into a more lyrical domain.

The second quartet (Opus 26 in E-flat major) was completed in 1933. At that time Korngold held what he probably thought was the secure position of a Professor of Music at the Vienna State Academy. It is unclear what he thought about living under Nazi domination; but in the following year Max Reinhardt arranged for him to move to Hollywood, where he became best known for his film scores. He would not write another string quartet until after the end of World War II; and his Opus 34 in D major was completed in 1945. That marked his move away from serving Hollywood to a return to concert music; and the best known result of those efforts was the Opus 35 violin concerto (again in D major), which became part of Jascha Heifetz’s repertoire and found its way to a recording.

What is most interesting is that, for all their chronological separation, all three of the quartets deliver an engagingly upbeat rhetoric. The Tippett players clearly appreciated that rhetoric in their studio sessions. I feel this is worth noting, since the composer after whom their ensemble is named tended toward a more serious rhetoric with an abundance of dark corners. Still, I do not think that Korngold should be accused of “whistling in the dark.” He had enough fortunate incidents in his career to justify his optimism; and I, for one, unabashedly enjoy how that optimism spills over from the Tippet Quartet performances.