I do not see a current entry for the Lafayette Quartet in The Classical Catalogue. But whether or not this is their debut recording, these young Americans, now based at the University of Victoria in Canada, certainly make a most favourable impression, helped by Dorian's warmly atmospheric recording.
Tchaikovsky's best-known quartet, with its famous Andante cantabile slow movement, is certainly a gift to musicians sympathetic to the more genial side of his nature; but the Lafayette also have a subtle grasp of rhythmic inflexion, which gives their performance an inner resilience and momentum to go with its warm and strongly profiled expression. The piece comes across as open-hearted, playful, and eminently re-hearable.
I was less happy with the Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues, not because of Rostislav Dubinsky's transcriptions (he was of course leader of the old Borodin Quartet and has coached the Lafayette), but because tempos are not always settled. The C major Fugue and the E flat (originally D flat) Prelude are fine, but the C major Prelude feels a little stodgy and there is some disagreement near the beginning of the E flat Fugue (I side with the viola, who holds out for a faster tempo than the violins).
The first movement of Shostakovich's Eighth Quartet highlights the ensemble's main point of fallibility, which is a tendency to over-punctuate. Here, and at the opening of the third movement, they sound more than a mite self-conscious as a result, labouring the obvious and missing the overall mood. But the rest of the performance is very fine indeed, overall I think probably the finest I have heard since the above-listed 1962 mid-price Borodin Quartet on Decca. Any quartet that can make the last movement as moving as this has to be in the right business.
This kind of Russian-plus-Soviet programming works extremely well on disc, and I hope the Lafayette Quartet and Dorian may be encouraged to embark on a series. The repertoire is certainly not over-exploited, and if a fair amount of it admittedly tends towards the academic, it still has its own steady rewards. Glazunov, Gliere, Shebalin and Miaskovsky would be valuable projects for starters...'