Though a programme of Italian string quartets sounds nearly as unusual as one of Russian madrigals, Verdi's single essay provides a substantial starting point and Puccini's beautiful eight-minute Crisantemi, elegiac in character and linked to his contemporaneous Manon Lescaut, is more solid fare than one might expect. The longest work here is the transcription by Emanuele Muzio, a Verdi pupil, of arias and ensembles from Verdi's 'tragic melodrama', Luisa Miller: not, evidently, all he transcribed but still eight sections lasting nearly half an hour. This, we read, is ''music intended for amateurs'' – and of course it's also unintended for string quartet. A mere publisher's pot-boiler, one might think, but the Hagen Quartet's skill and commitment do all that can be done for music that is only patchily rewarding.
Their performance of Verdi's Quartet offers passion along with Italianate sweetness, the latter not least in the first movement's dolce second subject, with its anticipation of Desdemona's music in Otello. Indeed, the playing and recording have a touch of rawness which is surely intentional and legitimately theatrical. For all these qualities, listen to the Andantino, a kind of stately minuet which is then surprisingly followed by a scherzo. Even so, I hear more intelligence than affection in this playing overall. I like the Hagens much more in Puccini's piece, to which they bring an impressive refined sadness; it seems to have faint echoes of Wagner's Tristan which the composer may have intended. There is an alternative account, from the Alberni, of the Verdi and Puccini, of which AB thought highly when it appeared; their disc is ten minutes shorter than this one, but its coupling of Donizetti's short Quartet No. 13 is attractive.
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