The Juilliards’ performance of Berg’s Lyric Suite is virtuoso in the fullest sense – in the control of every detail of an incredibly detailed score and the ability to make music of it all, in the intellectual rigour that contrasts the effect of movements varying from sophisticated serial techniques to freer tonal styles and sonata or rondo structures, above all in the ability to express how all this is necessary to one of the most passionately expressive quartets ever composed. They underline the lyricism which Berg justly claimed as motivating his music, whether joyfully heartfelt, inwardly tender (with the ‘private’ quotations from Zemlinsky’s own Lyric Symphony and from Tristan quietly conveyed), or at the end despairing. The comparative openness of the first movement, Allegro giovale, is a world away from the nervous secretiveness of the Allegro misterioso, in which Berg intertwines his initials with those of his hidden love Hanna Fuchs in a stunning piece of compositional skill that includes a Trio estatico: the Juilliards turn their dazzling technical control of this unfailingly to musical ends.
For this performance, which is not excelled by that of the Alban Berg Quartet themselves, the record is more than worth collectors’ attention. Such is not the case with the performances of Janacek’s two quartets. The understanding of Berg that perhaps comes out of a long appreciation of the Viennese quartet tradition does not necessarily provide a valid approach to Slavonic quartets and in particular those of Janacek himself. There is overstatement here, in music where less means more, and an absence of a quality that makes the Berg performance so rewarding – an instinct for timing. The vivace section in the Con moto third movement of No. 1 does not break out; we just come to it. The same occurs with the Adagio section in the first movement of the Second Quartet, and there is, throughout, inappropriate rubato and glissando, suggesting an interpretative insecurity which is markedly absent in the Berg performance. The wonderful Largamente moment in the third movement of No. 2 goes for little or nothing. It may not be coincidence that the recording of the Lyric Suite is more accurate in detail, beautifully so, than that of the Janacek works. This is, then, an ill-assorted record, but one very well worth hearing for the performance of the Lyric Suite.'