Books, Arts & Manners: A Little List

Hereunder a checklist of recent recordings that have given me pleasure and should you. In each case both the music and the performance merit inclusion.

The Juilliard String Quartet has taken on Beethoven’s Opus Nos. 127, 130, 131, 132, and 135, and the Great Fugue—a graveyard for some of our finest musicians—and triumphed. The Budapest and the Busch quartets, better in some respects than the Juilliard, were undone by these “later” Beethoven quartets because somehow they did not know why their fingers were where they were. The virtue of the Juilliard recording is that the ensemble made it a point to understand the scores before it sat down to record. Forget all the nonsense about Beethoven’s deafness. He knew exactly what he was doing—challenging the form to give its utmost, however harsh the message. Though he could not hear, in rehearsal he knew what was going on by intently watching the fingers and the bowing of the musicians. He had much to say, and the Juilliard has let me in on the secret for the first time (a CBS Masterworks CD, M3K 37873).

RT

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Ralph de Toledano

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Hereunder a checklist of recent recordings that have given me pleasure and should you. In each case both the music and the performance merit inclusion.

The Juilliard String Quartet has taken on Beethoven’s Opus Nos. 127, 130, 131, 132, and 135, and the Great Fugue—a graveyard for some of our finest musicians—and triumphed. The Budapest and the Busch quartets, better in some respects than the Juilliard, were undone by these “later” Beethoven quartets because somehow they did not know why their fingers were where they were. The virtue of the Juilliard recording is that the ensemble made it a point to understand the scores before it sat down to record. Forget all the nonsense about Beethoven’s deafness. He knew exactly what he was doing—challenging the form to give its utmost, however harsh the message. Though he could not hear, in rehearsal he knew what was going on by intently watching the fingers and the bowing of the musicians. He had much to say, and the Juilliard has let me in on the secret for the first time (a CBS Masterworks CD, M3K 37873).