Album Review: Doric String Quartet Korngold: The String Quartets

Doric String Quartet, <i>Korngold The String Quartets</i>. Photo / Supplied

Rating: 5/5
Verdict: English Quartet superb exploring the chamber music of Hollywood Kapellmeister

Last month, the Doric String Quartet, sharing a Town Hall concert with pianist Piers Lane, showed Auckland what chamber music is all about.

Their Haydn, in particular, revealed a young ensemble with the uncanny ability to convey the feeling this music was flowing fresh from the composer's pen.

The four Englishmen do the same for Erich Wolfgang Korngold on their exhilarating new Chandos recording of his complete quartets - a timely reminder this man was so much more than just a Warner Brothers Kapellmeister, spinning the fanfares and love themes through Errol Flynn's swashbuckling adventures.

Korngold's first two string quartets date from well before he crossed the Atlantic. While some might consider an A major work from 1914 as having too much thematic material for its own good, these musicians will have none of it, making us feel that every note and rest is absolutely indispensable.

And so, what could be a distractingly discursive work is kept firmly on track, especially in its fluttering Intermezzo, a sort of skewed minuet, a tizzy wonder of coy pizzicatos, frills and trills.

Korngold may have still been in Austria when he wrote his Second Quartet in 1933, but there are hints of Hollywood to come in its opening movement, with the Doric players at their most sonorous.

Every sigh, moue and glissando is made to count in its Intermezzo second movement and the four musicians revel in the adventurous textures of the following Larghetto not to mention a final Waltz determined to out-Strauss the Rosenkavalier man himself.

Korngold, a little like Handel, did not like to see good tunes languishing in old scores. His final Quartet, dating from 1945, at the height of the composer's Hollywood career, remembers themes from his soundtracks to Devotion, The Sea Wolf and Between Two Worlds.

The latter, rapturously laid out, is the perfect romantic interlude in a spiky scherzo a la Shostakovich.

You can expect a stream of releases from the Doric String Quartet over the next year or so; first in line is a programme of Walton, recorded in July.