Hearing the Lindsay play these quartets in concert can be a thrilling experience. Provided my memory isn't playing tricks, the versions on this new disc are very similar, in spirit and in detail, to two performances I heard about four or five years ago and enjoyed immensely. So why haven't I warmed to them? Perhaps the truth is that this explosively passionate playing sounds best from a safe distance. The recordings are very close, and while that hasn't meant a loss of ambience, it does make some of the more intense outbursts overbearing.
I can't fault the approach in itself. ''How it hurts,'' Janacek remarked of the piercing high E harmonic towards the end of Intimate letters, ''like cutting flesh''—he would almost certainly have admired the way it cuts through the texture here, to say nothing of the energy in the playing. There's no softening of extreme contrasts, but always the music seems to be carried forward by the swell of the emotions, whether in the alarming rapid pizzicatos just before the final climax of Quartet No. 1, or in Peter Cropper's achingly sad solo that begins the same movement. As for passing imperfections—small casualties here and there in the torrent of feeling—Janacek probably wouldn't have considered them worthy of mention. But I would advise any would-be buyer to try the recordings first—a few bars from the beginning of either quartet will be enough. If you've any doubts, go to the Talich (Calliope/Harmonia Mundi)—a good deal less extrovert but theirs are certainly 'intimate letters'—or to the Medici (Nimbus)—not quite soul-searing but dramatically convincing.
The Dvorak Cypresses sounds better, but then this is far less demonstrative music—immediacy is welcome here. Perhaps the Lindsay work a little too hard at some of this, but on the whole the approach is beautifully judged—gently persuasive, warmly atmospheric, and almost vocally alluring in passages like the opening viola solo of ''o duse draha, jedinka'' (No. 9). Some splendid music-making here, but as I said, sample the Janacek if you can before deciding.'