OTippett String Quartets — No. I; No. 2 in F; No. 4. Kreutzer Quartet (Peter Sheppard, David le Page, vns; Malcolm Allison, va; Philip Sheppard, ye).

Chandos Cr.) CHAN9560 (70 minutes: DDD).

Selected comparison..

Lindsay Qt (5/96) (ASV) CDDCS231

This second disc (for the first see 6/97) completes the Kreutzer Quartet's recordings of Tippett's five substantial works for the medium. The venue has changed from The Maltings, Snape to the Church of St John the Baptist, Loughton, but the sound certainly does not suffer: if anything, the immediacy with which the players interact in a well-focused balance is even more effective here than on the earlier disc.

The contrast between Tippett's two early quartets and the Fourth, written more than 30 years after No. 2, is strong but not absolute. No. 1 is launched in a way that creates instant confidence in the Kreutzer's approach, with a vibrant, flowing sense of line, and no awkwardness in those regular but tricky slowings-up that punctuate the texture. The wit and vitality of the composer's stillevolving style are well caught, and their survival in No. 2 is the more striking for the more clearly defined and deeply felt lyricism that now balances them. The Kreutzer work wonders at shrugging off the bar-lines in this intensely polyphonic music, and it is only in the last movement of No. 2 that the mood seems almost too contained. The Lindsay's version is just that bit more openly appassionato, as the heading demands.

Differences between these two groups emerge most clearly in the later stages of No. 4. In the slow third section the Kreutzer are markedly slower, as the score suggests, and achieve a delicacy and feeling for nuance that isn't quite matched in the less atmospheric (1978) ASV recording. In the final section, by contrast, the Kreutzer's more deliberate overall pace brings the risk of making too much of the dialogue between short fragments expressing jubilation and lament. There's more sense of cumulative interplay in the Lindsay's reading, though it can be argued that the Chandos version is more faithful to the music's essential modernism, and may well reflect debate between the players and their producer, Meirion Bowen, whb knows this music as well as anyone.

Taken together, the two Kreutzer discs are a powerful, persuasive achievement, and although the Lindsay's recordings will always have their historical pre-eminence, these new interpretations are more than worthy to stand beside them. AW