Azica to Release its Second Telegraph 4tet Album

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

One week from today, Azica Records will release the second album in a planned three-volume series entitled 20th Century Vantage Points. Those “vantage points” are compositions for string quartet; and the performers are the members of the Telegraph Quartet: violinists Eric Chin and Joseph Maille (who share first chair), violist Pei-Ling Lin, and cellist Jeremiah Shaw. The title of the new album is Edge of the Storm, which is a bit cryptic, since it covers a period between the early years of World War II and those that followed in the Cold War in the early Fifties. One might almost say that the chronology spans the two edges of the first war and the beginning of the second. As usually tends to be the case, Amazon.com has already created a Web page for processing pre-orders.

The album begins in Cold War Poland with the fourth string quartet by Grażyna Bacewicz, composed in 1951. This is definitely a “mature” composition, since her career as both composer and performer was well under way in the mid-Thirties. My awareness of her quartets goes back to my Examiner.com days, when I wrote about the Naxos release of all of those quartets on a pair of CDs released separately. The fourth quartet was one of her more upbeat works, perhaps reflecting the relief from the Nazis, even while behind the Iron Curtain.

This is followed by Benjamin Britten’s Opus 25, his first string quartet in D major. It was composed in the United States, after Britten, who was a conscientious objector, left England in 1939. Some readers may recall that Britten’s 1936 collection of three “divertimenti” was the final selection on Telegraph’s debut album, Into the Light. As is the case with many of his seldom-performed compositions, I only became aware of Britten’s quartets in 2013, when I wrote my articles about the Decca’s 65-CD box set Britten: The Complete Works for Examiner.com in 2013. I am glad that Telegraph has decided to add Britten’s Opus 25 to their repertoire.

The final selection is Mieczysław Weinberg’s Opus 35, his sixth quartet in E minor, composed after the end of World War II. Having lived through the horrors of that war, Weinberg now had to contend with the oppression of Soviet authorities. Those authorities deemed his music “not recommended for publication,” perhaps because it had been inspired primarily by a series of personal losses. As a result, the quartet was not given its first performance until Quatuor Danel added it to their repertoire in 2006.

This repertoire is a far cry from that of Divergent Paths, the first 20th Century Vantage Points release. The “divergence” on that album was between Maurice Ravel and Arnold Schoenberg, each of whom was cultivating his own approach to invention. Edge of the Storm, on the other hand, can be taken as three different perspectives on the dark times that emerged during World War II and persisted into the Cold War. If this is a “vantage point,” then it overlooks a decidedly bleak terrain. Nevertheless, music is not obliged to be “diversion for the sake of entertainment.” Bacewicz, Britten, and Weinberg all sustained a dark period in world history. Expressing their impressions through music made the journey more tolerable.