Juan Crisostomo Arriaga was born in Bilbao on January 27th, 1806 (precisely 50 years after Mozart), and died in Paris on January 17th, 1826. His opera Los esclavos felices was performed in his native city in 1820, and a year later he was sent to the Paris Conservatoire to study composition with Francois-Joseph Fetis. Between then and his death ten days before his 20th birthday he completed a symphony and three string quartets (which were published in Paris in 1824). The first two of these, in D minor and A major, were recorded by the Guilet Quartet for Nixa and reviewed in these columns as long ago as September 1952. When the record was discussed in The Record Guide (Collins: 1955), its editors declared that the quartets were ''said to be his best works and the two so far recorded certainly suggest a musician of genius'', adding that ''the idiom is clearly Beethoven, flecked with Weber and apparently with Schubert''. They went on to express the wish that recordings of the Third Quartet and of the Symphony would appear before too long. In the case of the Symphony the Guide's hopes were fulfilled a year or two later by EMI, and there have been other recordings of the quartets since then but none, so far as I am aware, that offers all three of them on CD.
I detect the influence of Mozart's Quartet in D minor, K421 in Arriaga's work in the same key, particularly in its elegiac outer movements, and more than a touch of Rossini, notably in the witty and colourful finale of the Quartet in A major, and even a foretaste of Berlioz in the striking second movement (''Pastorale'') of No. 3, with its dramatic 'storm' episode. But throughout one is astonished by the originality of the young Spaniard: in the powerful first movement of the Quartet in E flat (which boasts a Minuet in C minor!) and in the variation-form slow movement of the Quartet in A, where an eloquent minore variation is followed by an absolutely stunning one in which all four instruments play pizzicato.
The playing by the Voces Quartet, whose members are from northern Romania, is outstanding, and the recording, even if it may be a shade restricted in its dynamic range, is exceptionally generous in duration, since most if not all (I have not seen a score) of the repeats are observed. This is a fascinating issue.'