If you’re one of those people who switch off at the mention of the Second Vienna School, retract that finger for an hour. At least two pieces in this Lenkoro Quartet album will make you laugh and cry.
Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite was so sumptuously played by the Vienna Philharmonic at last summer’s BBC Poms that I can hardly bear to revert to the vegan original. Full of erotic hints at the epistolary love affair Berg was conducting with a married woman in Prague, it needs the full bloom of orchestral sound to make the listener swoon. But there’s enough intrigue in the quartet score, rippling with allusions to Wagner and Zemlinsky, to keep one occupied for half an hour.
At this point, the album goes off-piste with five pieces for string quartet by Erwin Schulhoff, who lived in Prague, not Vienna, but maintained a close connection with Berg. His music is less atonal than Dadaist, a ribald commentary on the aims and idiocies of ascetic modernism. Fun is not excluded either, notably in a brutal parody of the Viennese waltz.
Which brings us to Anton von Webern, which may have you reaching for a gun. Webern was, at times in his life certifiably insane and at others just unhappy. The string quartet he wrote in 1909 mourned his mother’s death. The Langsamer Satz of 1905 suggests all the things he’d like to do with the girl he wanted to marry. It’s Verklärte Nacht without the Angst, Lulu for virgins. If ever you imagined Webern as a soulless serialist, think again. This is sex for the single string quartet, and the Lenkoros do it rather well.
