Search - Franz Joseph Haydn, Kodaly Quartet :: Haydn: The Complete String Quartets (Box Set)

'All My Children'

J Scott Morrison | Middlebury VT, USA | 11/18/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Not ordinarily an envious sort, I am nonetheless envious of a friend, a violist, who has over the years played all the Haydn quartets with string-playing friends. What fun that must have been! Surely this body of works by Papa Haydn is among the most important ever written for the combination of two violins, viola and cello. And so many! Sixty-eight of them plus the quartet version of 'The Seven Last Words of Christ', plus several 'cassations' and several (like the Op. 3 quartets) now often attributed to others, a total of eighty-three! Almost inexhaustible riches.



Over the years I have collected several of the singly-issued CDs of various of the quartets recorded by the redoubtable Kodály Quartet but now have this collection of all of the quartets recorded by them. The price of the collection is very much in the budget range -- less than $4 per CD -- and worth every penny. They range from the Op. 1 quartets (including the strangely designated Op. 1, No. 0) which are much more like divertimenti with their two minuets to the Op. 9 quartets that display the quintessential element of the string quartet, conversation among the individuals. To the Op. 17 set with their virtuosic first violin parts and the Op. 20 quartets which not only echo the Sturm und Drang mood of Haydn's contemporaneous symphonies but also feature much more virtuosic cello parts. To the Op. 33 set which mostly leave behind the fugal, baroquish language of the earlier quartets and show more rhythmic and harmonic daring as well as the wit that has come to be called 'Haydnesque' when it occurs in other composers' works; these quartets also replace minuets with scherzos; it was the Op. 33 quartets that Mozart studied when he was writing his own so-called 'Haydn Quartets'. To the Op. 50 'Prussian' Quartets, written for the cello-playing King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, the two sets of 'Tost' Quartets (Opp. 54, 55, 64), the 'Apponyi' Quartets (Opp. 71 & 74), these the first set specifically meant for public performance (previously the quartets were for private music-making). And on through to the final quartets, Opp. 76 ('Erdödy') and 77 ('Lobkowitz'). This 25-CD set concludes with 'The Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross', Op. 51, with its nine slow movements, and the two-movement Op. 103 quartet, written in 1803 when Haydn was failing and which he was unable to finish.



The Kodály Quartet recorded these marvelous performances in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s. Their membership, subsequently changed, consisted of Attila Falvay, 1st violin; Tamás Szabo, 2nd violin; Gábor Fias, viola; and János Devich, cello. Huzzah to them! There are many recording of these works by other quartets but for a combination of musicality, heartfelt playing, excellent recorded sound, and price, this set cannot be beat.



You can read other reviews of these recordings at the Amazon product pages for the single issues, e.g. Haydn: String Quartets, Op. 33 "Russian", No. 1, No. 2 "The Joke", No. 5 "How do you do?", Haydn: The Emperor, Fifths and Sunrise Quartets, Haydn: String Quartets Op. 76, Nos. 1-3, Haydn: String Quartets, Op. 76, Nos. 4, 5 and 6.



Total time: 25 hours, 42 minutes.



Heartily, even urgently, recommended.



Scott Morrison"

Full, rich quartet recording.

Robin Ray | Seattle, WA USA | 04/03/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"It's a customary practice these days, or at least within the last 10 years or so, to "thicken" up a string quartet recording by quadrupling the violins, doubling the violas, etc. This results in a fat, smooth, sonorous recording such as those performed by I Musici, I Solisti Italiani, etc. The Complete Haydn String Quartets, as performed by the Kodaly Quartet and recorded at the Unitarian Church in Budapest in 1991, doesn't need such treatment. The recording is so clear and full you can practically smell the wood of the pews or see rays of sound bouncing off the stained glass windows. Enhanced by natural reverb, the strings need no "sweetening" and the overall quartets require no compression or volume balancing. What you hear is an absolute dream, a chance to dive head first into a repertoire that is often overshadowed by the quartets or other luminaries such as Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, or Dvorak. This set, albeit as expensive as it is, is highly recommended. These recordings are perfect for Sunday morning, winding down from work after a hectic day, or even as accompaniment while you peruse the NY Times. Highly recommended."

Meet The Beatles

Thomas Plotkin | West Hartford CT, United States | 09/05/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The string quartet has always held a privileged place in classical music -- the conversation between four individuals, two violinists, a cellist and a violist, represents music not made for the general public but as a gift to the musicians; as such the genre has often represented the superego of composers -- their deepest utterances, and the ones they knew they would be judged by their peers and not the public. The genre also typifies the Enlightenment, an era marked by the utmost mathematical rationality but never far from the tumultuous storms of coming revolution -- however, the genre died in the Romantic era -- paradoxically because it was too private for narcisssist displays of will to power -- and was only resurrected by the introspection of 20th century modernists like Bartok, Schoenberg, Berg and Webern.



Sometime in the 1760's Haydn basically invented the string quartet, in addition to perfecting the sonata form inherited by Beethoven, development forms, the four-movement symphony, and the "classical style" (as opposed to baroque polyphony and the genres lumped together as early music); this meant an infusion of drama (derived from his failures as an opera composer, but adding juice to his instrumental music), subjectivity,a bumptious mixture of high and low styles, and poetry infused with enlightenment reason. Every central European composer of concert music owes him everything. He is probably the single most under-rated innovator in the history of music, because his music as the joke goes is too simple for amateurs and too complex for professionals. Put it this way: Beethoven and Mozart acknowledged him as their only lord and master, as they were left with mining the territory he first explored.



His string quartets are the crowning glory of his art, as one can trace his development out of the baroque and galante styles into a wider-ranging relationship to tonality than had hitherto been known, where music began to tell Shakespearean stories that mixed comedy and tragedy in a mutable fashion absent from the work of deities like Bach and Handel, stately stasis was replaced by drama; he wrote in the vicinity of seventy quartets, and no two movements sound similar, the sheer range of his achievement is unbelievable. The Kodaly Quartet out of Budapest, not far from the Ezterhazy court where Haydn performed most of his labors, recorded all of them for the budget label Naxos in the late eighties and nineties, and now all 24 CD's are available for less than a hundred bucks; this music as performed by these masters constitutes the most gracious, witty, graceful and pleasing tribute to the values of western civilization I can imagine, and would be a bargain at twice the price."