These recordings were made last year after a series of concerts commemorating the 50th anniversary of Weigl’s death. The protagonists are perhaps best known for their fine Zemlinsky series, also on Nimbus, and the present issue offers similarly high technical standards. The performances are cogent, well played and forcefully paced, though not over-endowed with human warmth. And, arguably, this is precisely what the music needs. The disc comes emblazoned with the posthumous endorsement of Pablo Casals: ‘Karl Weigl’s music will not be lost. We will return to it after the storm has passed. We will return to those who have written real music.’
So far the Artis Quartet, distinguished proteges of the LaSalle, are the only world-renowned string quartet to have championed this composer, whose music was admired by Strauss, Schoenberg, Walter, Furtwangler and Stokowski, but whose substantial oeuvre has fallen into relative obscurity. This may be an accident of history: Weigl escaped Nazi persecution in 1938, finding work in the USA as an academic without building a substantial following for his own music. That said, I suspect that the explanation lies partly in the benign character of Weigl’s composing. This is not quite what you would expect from a pupil of Zemlinsky and an assistant to Mahler. The technical facility and traditional Viennese virtues of the First Quartet (1904) were acclaimed by Schoenberg, no less, and yet its emotional world is already curiously circumspect.
Weigl was a late romantic who, like Korngold, saw no reason to change. Unlike Korngold, however, his nostalgia is both amiable and ultra-discreet. The Fifth Quartet (1933) throws a few (very few) cryptic gestures to the modernist wolves, but deploys them in quasi-ironic fashion as if to pre-empt criticism of a harmonic language that is avowedly anachronistic, closer to Brahms or Dvorak. One early critique cited in the booklet-notes mentions Schubert and Hugo Wolf – Weigl was also a prolific writer of songs. While the clarity, elegance and certainty of the invention cannot but impress, the results are in some ways disturbingly low-key, and the melodic ideas do not draw much attention to themselves. Only the Larghetto (track 7) shows much in the way of emotional generosity, and even this has no truck with the angry spirit of the age. Does this matter in the face of such consummate craftsmanship? The choice is yours. This is a most intriguing release.'