Nightingale String Quartet - Rued Langgaard - String Quartets nos. 2, 3 & 6 (2012)

The string quartets of Danish music's eccentric outsider Rued Langgaard are passionate works of the composer's youth, representing both his nostalgically romantic side and his profoundly visionary modernity. For the first time on CD, this recording series presents all 8 quartets in the award-winning young Nightingale String Quartet's distinctly dramatic interpretation based on the revised Rued Langgaard Edition. Nightingale String Quartet has won awards at several national as well as international chamber music competitions including 1st prize at the Royal Danish Academy of Music scholarship chamber music competition.

The Nightingale String Quartets performance of three quartets by Rued Langgaard (1893-1952) is the first volume of a series that will eventually include all nine of the composers string quartets. It is an auspicious debut. This is a recently formed quartet (2007) and a young one: all four members are students at the Royal Danish Academy of Music. The performers bring considerable youthful enthusiasm to the Langgaard quartets, but even more interestingly, they seem fully comfortable with Langgaards sometimes uneasy blend of nostalgia and Romanticism, on the one hand, and complex and forward-looking mood swings, on the other. Indeed, Langgaard here sounds like a more-modern composer than he frequently does in performances of his 16 symphonies (or 17, counting the two very different versions of No. 5): the quartets are both more intimate and at times more acerbic than the larger-scale works. The programmatic Quartet No. 2 offers interesting scene-painting in movements entitled Storm Clouds Receding, Train Passing By, Landscape in Twilight and The Walk. No. 3 is a generally intense work, with such tempo indications as Furioso, Furioso mortifero and Mosso frenetico. No. 6, in one movement, is a milder piece that incorporates a Swedish folk tune in its final section. In addition to the quartets, the ones on this SACD date from 1918 to 1924, although No. 6 was revised as late as 1931 - the Nightingale String Quartet performs the intricate Variations on Mig Hjertelig Nu Længes (which translates as I Heartily Now Yearn, although the tune's actual title is Oh Sacred Head, Now Wounded). Generally slow, but with some outbursts of intensity, this is a thoroughly Romantic quartet work whose overall effect is very moving, nicely complementing the more-intense mood changes of the numbered quartets. -- Mark Estren