Excellent to have a new recording of these Ives classics from a major ensemble. The First Quartet (1896) is a student work, saturated in hymn-tunes: each movement was probably used as an organ voluntary. But, like the Third Symphony, it assembles an affectionate archive of religious forms of musical expression ranging from mystical intensity to almost ecstatic fervour. This is vintage early Ives and wears well. The Fugue, which forms the first movement of the First Quartet, crops up again—an unexpected change of style—as the third movement of the Fourth Symphony. In the performance the Emerson has everything under control even if the third movement, an offertory based on the hymn-tune Nettleton, is slightly cold.
Ives's Second Quartet (1913) is wildly different. With the first movement called ''Discussions'' and the second ''Arguments'' there is free scope for all Ives's photographic realism with textures as violent as middle-period Bartok later on. The Emerson brings hard-edged attack to the ''Arguments'' but the ironic ''Andante Emasculata'', a burlesque cadenza at 0'43'', and similar moments are a little short-changed. The last movement, ''The Call of the Mountains'', has a real chill when it opens largely without vibrato: and it climaxes resoundingly on ''Nearer my God'', linking this peroration to the last movement of the Fourth Symphony. The Scherzo is a rarity—a brief comic study in rhythmic juxtapositions with the occasional diatonic tune sticking out of the melee.
The CD is completed with Barber's early Quartet (1936) famous for its ubiquitous Adagio heard here as the soft centre between the two allegro movements which were its original packaging. Another fine performance, well recorded, in a most welcome release.'