String Quartets Vol 2 (Nos 3 & 5)

The Tippett Quartet complete their survey of these important works

A span of 45 years separates Tippett's Third and Fifth string quartets, yet in their questing lyricism and dance-driven exuberance they have a good deal in common. The difference, and the challenge for their interpreters, is in the contrast between No 3's radical rethinking of tradition-specifically the fugal writing of the late Beethoven quartets-and No 5's references to the kind of interplay between continuity and discontinuity more characteristic of a modernist aesthetic.

Tippett in 1946 was entering his most visionary phase but the Tippett Quartet's approach to the Third Quartet emphasises weight and earthiness rather than the transcendent lightness of spirit that would emerge most fully in The Midsummer Marriage. There's a sense of the piece's formidable technical challenges being bravely confronted rather than triumphantly overcome; but this is certainly a performance full of drama and excitement, a feature enhanced by the closely focused recording.

Tippett was 85 when he began work on his Fifth Quartet in 1990, and the best music comes in a first movement whose sustained spontaneity is admirably conveyed in this performance. The Tippett Quartet can also be commended for not rushing or over-dramatising the more diffuse and repetitive second movement, even though it now seems a pity that the composer wasn't persuaded to prune some of its more extended duplications. The Tippett Quartet's well integrated sound is a pleasure throughout, and together with their first Tippett disc (8.570496) this completes a rewarding survey of a contribution to the quartet repertory which is in danger-undeservedly-of falling out of fashion.
(Gramophone)