★★★★
At the end of a week of abusive American power, the last thing I wanted to hear was sentimental Americana squeezed out by a string quartet based in Delaware. There’s a reason companies list in Delaware. It has 2 percent tax, business-friendly courts and no questions asked. Unreal.
Still, you never know what a recording will reveal. This one plays out four unrelated styles. Samuel Barber’s first string quartet is known for its mournful middle movement, Barber’s Adagio. The outer movements are rich in tunes. Every American composer envied Uncle Sam Barber’s gift for melody.
Jazzman Wynton Marsalis raids New Orleans folklore for his source material, and none the worse for that: it’s authentic meting-pot music. A four-minute John Williams theme is potted nostalgia for an America that never was. And the third string quartet of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, a Hitler refugee in Hollywood, is a lament for a lost Vienna that was largely a figment of musical imagination. One way or other, the tapestry album brims with collective self-deception.
But the Calidore String Quartet play like disembodied angels. Taking their name from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and cutting their professional teeth as BBC New-Gen Artists, these musicians transcend their dubious theme to produce an hour of pleasure and ten minutes of filler (I won’t say which is which). Their performance of the Korngold quartet is especially uplifting, and barely American. Or belonging to a better America, past and possibly future.
