Zemlinsky’s four quartets have never quite become part of the established chamber music repertory, though the LaSalle Quartet (whose fine complete recording of them – DG, 8/89 – is alas no longer available) programmed them enthusiastically. That they deserve a place in that repertory is eloquently argued by both these new couplings. Nimbus announce that the Artis Quartet will be recording the Third and Fourth Quartets in due course; Praga make no such promise about the Prazak completing their survey, but it would be a great pity if they did not. Both groups have studied either with the LaSalle Quartet or with their leader, Walter Levin, but both adopt a broader approach than the LaSalle in almost every movement. In the richly post-Brahmsian First Quartet the Artis produce splendidly ample tone, warm intensity of expression and, in the demurely lilting Scherzo, a touch of humour that I think even the La Salle did not find there. The Prazak do not have quite their Austrian colleagues’ variety of colour (the Artis play a Montagnana, an Andrea Guarneri, a Guadagnini and an Andrea Amati, which helps) and their slower tempos, though adding a touch of geniality to the first movement, also add a hint of heavy-footedness to the scherzo. On the other hand they are readier to play quietly, and reveal more shadow in the slow movement.
The Artis complete their disc with an account of the Second Quartet which is startlingly successful in conveying its abrupt, at times violent oscillations of mood and its extraordinary vehemence, while very properly finding the centre of its emotional world to be a poignant lyricism. The Prazak have the still harder task of the Fourth Quartet, one of the most demanding pieces for the medium ever written. If I unworthily suspected that their slowish Scherzo in the First Quartet was due to caution, their account of the Fourth’s concluding double fugue convincingly demonstrates their hair-raising virtuosity. And in the rest of this work their very slightly rougher, brighter sound is a positive advantage, though in the elaborately florid textures of the penultimate variation movement they show that they can also produce sweet tone and a fine line. I can’t wait to hear what the Artis will make of this work.
Until both quartets complete their cycles you won’t catch me parting with either of these discs. If you insist on a recommendation at this stage it would have to be, but only by a whisker, for the Artis. But the Prazak add a substantial bonus in the form of a pair of movements from an abandoned quartet of 1927, the first strangely based on an almost derisive fragment of Yankee Doodle, the second an apparent attempt to fuse a slow movement, at times mysterious, at times intense, with more aggressive music that eventually gives birth to an enigmatic minuet. Both discs are well recorded, the Nimbus sound being a little warmer than the Praga.'