Benjamin Britten: Quatuor Béla - Quatuor Béla

Video

Read the Review

Since its founding in 2006, Quatuor Béla have been touted as the enfants terrible of French string quartets. In addition to a commitment to traditional quartet repertoire they specialize in the most significant quartets of the 20th century and have been instrumental in the continuing development of the genre commissioning and performing works by Saariaho, Drouet, Stroppa, Mochizuki, Leroux and Platz to name just a few. Benjamin Britten (lepalaisdesdegustateurs.com) is their latest release, two CDs including Britten’s three numbered string quartets and a strikingly effective bare bones transcription by first violinist Frédéric Aurier of Les Illuminations with soprano Julia Wischniewski. Aurier also wrote the detailed and insightful liner notes which provide context and analysis of the works presented. I particularly like the way he relates the string quartets to Britten’s operas. The first two were written while the world was in the throes of the Second World War; String Quartet No.1 in 1941 while Britten and his partner Peter Pears were sheltering in the USA (they returned to Britain in 1942) and String Quartet No.2 in 1945. Although ostensibly written to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Henry Purcell’s death, the second quartet also incorporates the feelings of devastation Britten experienced while visiting Germany with Yehudi Menuhin after the armistice to perform for liberated prisoners and emaciated survivors from German camps, including the notorious Bergen-Belsen. The three-movement work concludes with what Aurier calls a “bewildering” Chaconne with its theme and variations, a theme “which has its operatic twin in Britten’s The Turn of the Screw.” Aurier goes on to say that “Though the tribute to Purcell is real, it is a Beethovenian force that drives the piece” and the repeated final chords are indeed reminiscent of that master. Three decades would elapse before Britten returned to the form, and the String Quartet No.3 (1975) was his final completed instrumental work. It is closely linked to the opera Death in Venice written shortly beforehand and it ends peacefully, the work of a composer facing his own imminent death. Here, as elsewhere in these impeccable performances, Quatuor Béla captures every subtle nuance and dramatic cadence with aplomb. 

Les Illuminations was begun in England in March 1939 and completed a few months later in the United States. It was originally scored for soprano and string orchestra, but within two years of its premiere Britten conducted Pears in the tenor version which has become more often performed. But as Britten’s biographer David Matthews wrote, the work is “so much more sensuous when sung by the soprano voice for which the songs were conceived.” Wischniewski certainly brings sensuousness and passion to fore here in a spectacular performance. The texts are selected passages from poems abandoned by Arthur Rimbaud at the age of 20, later published under the same name as the song cycle. Although the poems are not included in the booklet, the notes give a synopsis of each of the nine movements. As for the “de-orchestration,” Aurier tells us that “as in any reduction, something is lost… a smoothness, a density, a quiet force. And something is gained… a sharpness, details, the quintessence of the speech, the articulation and the urgency of the music perhaps. We wanted this version to be faithful, dynamic and expressive, more raw perhaps, but connected with the Rimbaldian delirium.” Mission accomplished.

Buy Now

Buy on lepalaisdesdegustateurs-shop.com