On track: Fleshing out the Romantics

By WILLIAM DART

Last night, in the Auckland Town Hall, the Australian Chamber Orchestra gave us the Ravel String Quartet. Meanwhile, a new Telarc release offers the strings of the Royal Philharmonic with fleshed-out versions of two other quartets - Schubert's Death and the Maiden and Dvorak's American.

Listening to Mahler's dark and brooding take on the Schubert, it's easy to see why the work appealed to the man who wrote Kindertotenlieder. Is it, one wonders, the Symphony for Strings that Mahler never wrote?

Charles Rosekranz and his players throw themselves into it all with gusto and Telarc's much vaunted DSD sound redefines resonant, although it can't quite disguise some weak violin lines in the second movement.

The Dvorak is less convincing, but perhaps we should be content with the lovely String Serenade that we have, scored by the composer's own pen. This uncredited arrangement takes the Quartet into a strange no-man's land and loses the balance of intimacy and tension the original four instruments give.

The same Dvorak turns up on Gidon Kremer's new Happy Birthday CD. The seventh of Peter Heidrich's Happy Birthday Variations spins out the Happy Birthday tune over a cloned version of the Quartet's opening page.

Kremer is an inspirational violinist with a talent for combining a sweet tone and tasty concepts in his albums with the Kremerata Baltica. Happy Birthday does rather risk being too cute for its own good, although there is only one major lapse in taste - Teddy Bor's McMozart's Eine Kleine Bright Moonlicht Nicht Musik which veers back and forth from Wolfgang's original K 525 to sporran-bouncers like Scotland the Brave.

Otherwise, there's humour in a Schnittke polka, melting lyricism when Kremer plays an Elegy by Tchaikovsky and a wacky commission in Vato Kakhizes' Blitz Fantasy.

The choice offering is Franz Waxman's Auld Lang Syne Variations, and it's perfect to fill that 12:47 leading up to midnight on December 31. The Hollywood composer takes the New Year ditty on visits with four composers from Mozart to Shostakovich. Believe me, once you've heard Chaconne a Son Gout, Bach's D minor Chaconne will never be the same.

* Schubert and Dvorak scored for String Orchestra (Telarc CD 80610, through Elite); Gidon Kremer and the Kremerata Baltica, Happy Birthday (Nonbesuch 79657)