JUILLIARD QUARTET Bartók: The Complete String Quartets (1949) - PACM089

The Juilliard String Quartet was a perfect fit for the American Century, musically speaking, and like two other icons of the time, Leonard Bernstein and Van Cliburn, it was a postwar phenomenon. Its reputation was made by this complete set of the six Bartók quartets; that appeared in LP form in 1950 from Columbia Records, who had successfully launched the new format in 1948. Contrary to popular belief, the performances were recorded on large 78-rpm shellacs rather than tape, and subsequently Columbia released the set as six 78 records—one of the few times, I imagine, that 78s came out after an LP release.

What we hear, then, are live, unedited readings done in 1949 at Columbia’s 30th St. studio. The Julliard Quartet was founded in 1946, the same year as the Juilliard School of Music (it had previously existed as a graduate school). Its inception was due to the school’s president, William Schuman, suggesting that four faculty members—Robert Mann and Robert Koff, violins, Raphael Hillyer, viola, and Arthur Winograd, cello—form the ensemble. Schuman also persuaded Serge Koussevitzky to host their first public appearance at Tanglewood in 1947. They returned the following summer to perform the six Bartók quartets in private concerts for students.

Going into the studio was an exciting event. Only one of Bartók’s quartets had been recorded more than once, and when the composer died in New York City in 1945, his music, always admired in Modernist circles, was beginning to capture wider popular appeal. Mann, a great enthusiast of Bartók, had been present at the premiere of Quartet No. 6 in Town Hall in January 1941. When the young Juilliard performed the first-ever public cycle of the quartets in Times Hall in early 1949, the audience was packed with musical luminaries, including (believe it or not) Dmitri Shostakovich, who had come to the U.S. as part of a Soviet peace delegation. Also present was Goddard Lieberson, the visionary Columbia Records producer who gave us the complete Stravinsky conducted by the composer as well as a Broadway cast recording of Bernstein’s Candide, even though the show had been a commercial flop. The stars were aligned for the historic Juilliard recording sessions, and these, too, attracted some notable invited guests, including Jascha Heifetz, who reportedly made astute comments about tempo relations in Quartet No. 4.

By the time the Juilliard made its famous and now standard stereo version of the complete quartets in the 1960s, only Mann and Hillyer remained of the founding members. Knowing just the stereo cycle in my student years, I was astonished at the added freshness and intensity of the 1950 mono set—by chance, a compilation CD from Sony happened to include the older Fourth Quartet. Once the 1960s cycle took hold, the 1950 one fell away and didn’t appear on CD until the small English reissue label, Pearl, took that step in 2001. (I’m indebted to the assiduous Pearl program notes for the historical details in this review.) To my knowledge the best-sounding set now in print is from Pristine Audio; the Pearl issue is out of print, and I believe the label must be defunct.

String quartets were notoriously difficult to record faithfully at the time, and reissue labels, lacking access to the original masters, work from a collector’s 78s or LPs. The chief flaws to overcome here are lack of depth in the cello part and thin upper register in the violins. Producer Andrew Rose has managed to make the original sound lively and very present, with added space around the instruments using Pristine’s XR ambience, yet the cello is still under-represented. As its members approached the scores—we’re told that Quartet No. 1 and No. 6 were the easiest to learn, the finale of No. 5 the most intractable—the Juilliard had the advantage of two authorities in matters of style, the composer’s son Peter and violinist Jenö Léner, founder and leader of the famed Léner Quartet in Hungary in 1918. As a member of the later Kolisch Quartet, Léner had been part of the premiere of the Sixth Quartet. No doubt it was invaluable, stepping into Bartók’s unique sound world, to learn almost first-hand how to play the special bowing and pizzicato techniques he had invented.

I’ve spent most of this review describing the remarkable circumstances surrounding the historical importance of the Juilliard’s first cycle, taking it as a given that the ensemble deserves its renown in Bartók, whom it approached in 1950 with warmth and sometimes even Romanticism. Its impeccable execution set a new standard for its day. In the current marketplace you can hear a variety of styles for interpreting these six great works of 20th-century Modernism. With glint-eyed efficiency, even the Juilliard’s fame for virtuosity has been surpassed. For me, the real attraction of this cycle is its joy of discovery, which remains completely fresh and vivid. Pristine offers the recordings on CD or as downloads at various speeds (mine was a 16-bit FLAC file); each disc can be ordered separately.

Huntley Dent

This article originally appeared in Issue 40:5 (May/June 2017) of Fanfare Magazine.