The Castalian Quartet takes the listener on a philosophical journey in its beautiful and original first album, says Kate Wakeling
RECORDING OF THE MONTH
Between Two Worlds
Lassus: La nuit froide et sombre (arr. Simonen);
Beethoven: String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, Op. 132;
Thomas Adès: The Four Quartets; Dowland: Come Heavy Sleep (arr. Simonen)
The Castalian String Quartet
Delphian DCD34272 66:43 mins
This outstanding disc offers listeners a true philosophical journey. Perceptively programmed, Between Two Worlds explores the mystic properties of time through a series of intricately connected works, each performed with rare beauty and originality by a quartet working at the height of its powers.
The disc opens with a mesmerising, near-whispered performance of Lassus’s ‘La nuit froide et sombre’ (arranged by the quartet’s own first violinist Sini Simonen) which charts the cycle of night and day as a mirror of the human propensity to oscillate between hope and despair. From here, we move to Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, Op. 132, a piece which travels ‘from the terrestrial to the celestial and back’. This work, the second of Beethoven’s five late quartets, was composed in the summer of 1825, just two years before the composer’s death. By now, Beethoven’s hearing loss was profound and he was intermittently stricken with a horribly painful intestinal problem. The score reflects it all with heartrending intensity, in the words of Simonen ‘moving from the anguished to the heavenly before crashing back to earthly suffering’.
The Castalian Quartet is intimately alive to every shift of colour and mood in this extraordinary score and succeeds in conjuring the sense of both deep contemplation and vivid spontaneity. The quartet is especially daring with timbre, sometimes stripping back the sound to viol-like clarity while also being unafraid to dig in with a refreshing rawness when the score so demands. The quartet’s rendering of the work’s monumental third movement – subtitled Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart (Song of Thanksgiving from a Convalescent to the Divinity, in the Lydian mode) – is nothing short of a revelation in its lucidity of line and sheer beauty of sound.
The score of this same Beethoven quartet was reportedly spread across TS Eliot’s desk as he worked on his seminal Four Quartets.
In turn, these four poems have a powerful if elusive connection to Thomas Adès’s bold and mysterious The Four Qu
