Review

Rued Langgaard: String Quartets Vol. 1

13 May 2012 BBC Music Magazine - CHAMBER CHOICE JUNE 2012

Stephen Johnson
5/5 Stars

Strange and wonderful

One of the many refreshing things about the Danish maverick Rued Langgaard is the way he eludes being tagged either 'modernist' or 'conservative'. At first the Second Quartet sounds like a piece of vigorous early 20th-century Romanticism. But it soon becomes clear that this composer doesn't think like anyone else. The ideas can be lively, beautiful, touching, at times more than a little weird. You might expect them to unfold along relatively familiar formal lines; instead you might end up wondering if there's real progress at all - at least in the familiar Western European sense. Themes and gestures relate to each other rather like figures in a mobile designed by Max Escher. This paradox is easier to grasp in the more outwardly radical Quartet No. 3, which echoes the edgier Nielsen, late Janacék and the younger Hindemith, yets outdoes any of them in the sheer strangeness of its associative logic. Even the startlingly un-20th-century-sounding Variations - which at times could be either Beethoven or Schumann paying tribute to JS Bach - has a quietly riddling quality. Crucially the Nightingale Quartet understand all these aspects: the provocative vitality, the fragile romantic sensitivity and the striking intellectual independence behind it all. It's all beautifully recorded too.

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Review

Rued Langgaard: String Quartets Vol. 1

Strange and wonderful