Classic CD: Puertas Quartet

Puertas Quartet.

Classic CD
Stars: 4/5
Puertas Quartet (Atoll)
Verdict: A welcome summer tour is supported by a fine, if conservative, CD.

Touring the country earlier this month, the Puertas Quartet made sure that the lazy, hazy days of summer were not totally bereft of classical music.

In Auckland, this meant an intimate concert at the Pah Homestead featuring music by Wolf, Mendelssohn and Beethoven, with a short Rachmaninov encore from the group's new Atoll CD.

This album is well worth searching out. The playlist may be a tad conservative, but two full-scale works by Ravel and Tchaikovsky are beautifully delivered and that Rachmaninov Romance is quite simply aural honey, to the last sighing portamento.

Tracy Trinder's cover photographs, taken at Muriwai, suggest this is an all-Kiwi affair but, miraculously, the four musicians sustain the group from opposite sides of the globe.

Julia and Andrew Joyce, better known as principal viola and cello in the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, have found the ideal colleagues in two British-based violinists, Ellie Fagg and Tom Norris.

In fact, the disc was recorded at Suffolk's legendary Potton Hall with producer Jeremy Hayes, whose ear for nuance and style can also be heard on the Brodsky Quartet's latest collection, New World Quartets.

The Puertas players make Ravel's 1903 Quartet a bewitching experience. In the first movement, subtly energised dialogue never ruffles diaphanous textures; and our first taste of a whispering leggiero, just seconds into the work, catches the breath.

The pizzicato second movement gives priority to elegance over the brisk drama that some groups bring to play, and the extra weight of the Finale sets graceful gentler episodes into a special relief.

How well these four musicians gauge the sweetness of Tchaikovsky's dolce, opening his First String Quartet, only to move on to a high-tensile thematic weave that has the same purposefulness as their Beethoven at the Pah.

The well-known Andante cantabile, finely shaded under Tom Norris' airborne violin, has the perfect complement in a vibrant folk dance of a scherzo.

My only reservation here is the album's lack of programme notes. Background information would have been appreciated, particularly with the curious origins of that soulful Romance by the teenage Rachmaninov.