NOTE: Since this review was written, I have identified the recording on this CD of the String Quartet No. 15 played by the Beethoven Quartet as being a reproduction of an original recording made in Russia, not Prague. For reference purposes, my review is reproduced unedited, but the recording venue and date data above, as listed by Praga, are incorrect. Full details are contained in my report in DSCH No. 15 on misattributed recordings on the Praga label. WMR.

Two uncompromising recitals make this a desirable entry, the more so following the departure from the catalogue of the Beethoven Quartet's powerful Fifteenth Quartet recording from 1975, released in 1994 on Consonance (81-3006).

The Glinka Quartet's Fourteenth Quartet is a Dostoyevskian tale of existential questing. Their strings speak in richly nuanced, accurate, and almost impossibly weighty tones. This is captured in a clean but extreme stereo that situates the musicians at the edges of the soundstage, to dramatic effect in the third movement where they volley the melodic line back and forth between right and left speakers.

The Glinka Quartet played Tchaikovsky at Shostakovich's civic funeral two years before this recording, and disbanded the next year due to the emigration to the Netherlands of their viola player and cellist. It is valuable to have this documentation of a successful partnership.

A greyer Quartet No. 15 than the one on offer here would be hard to imagine. Surely this owes something to the fateful connections between this specific opus and the team delivering it. Alone among Shostakovich's quartets from No. 2 onwards, No. 15 was not premièred by the Beethoven Quartet, that honour falling to the Taneyev Quartet at the Leningrad Composers' Club on 25 October 1974. The Beethovens were originally slated to handle the première, and had rehearsed the work on the morning of 18 October. Later that day, however, Sergei Shirinsky, their original cellist and dedicatee of Quartet No. 14, died unexpectedly. With Yevgeny Altman replacing Shirinsky, the reconstituted Beethoven Quartet gave the Fifteenth's first Moscow performance on 11 January 1975. The composer died just seven months later without ever hearing his final work, the Viola Sonata that he had dedicated to the Beethoven Quartet's viola player, Fyodor Druzhinin.

The atmosphere of this reading is oppressive, death permeating its thirty-seven minute duration - you can practically taste it. Gun-metal grey is the only tint admitted. Within that limitation, the players are expressive of a range of shadings, from stark brooding to screaming anguish. The Beethovens maintain a pace that never stagnates, and are intimately coordinated; there is no trace of any seam between Altman and his longer-entwined companions.

The Fifteenth Quartet recording bears much more analogue hiss than its disc-mate, but the ear rapidly adjusts. Judging by the odd stifled cough it appears to be a live recording, though the notes do not indicate this. The acoustics do not mask the power of the performance, which is both historically and musically indispensable.

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