Beethoven: The Complete String Quartets. Alexander String Quartet (Foghorn Classics)

The Alexaner's second recording of the Beethoven cycle, recorded in 2008 at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, is a landmark journey through the greatest of all quartet cycles, marked by a startling sense of musical topography, open-minded musical integrity, and a recording poised ideally between warmth and clarity. There are versions of these oft-recorded works with more attitude, and some that display more virtuosity, but none with the Alexanders’ simple eloquence: speeds are mostly moderate and emotional explosions infrequent, but well-judged.

Sonically, these recordings compose an extraordinary, landmark set. The sense of physical dimensionality the quartet gives to the music creates a totally new experience, almost holographic.

Musically, this nine-CD collection is just as enchanting. It is as if the Alexanders—Zakarias Grafi lo, Fred Lifsitz, Paul Yarbrough, Sandy Wilson—are playing what they find in the score without prejudice or preference to any of the instruments they play. There is no stylistic agenda nor reliance on psychological “evaluations” of the composer. Instead, the Alexanders explore the musical and emotional adventures that result when, using the Henle edition (“It's the best and cleanest and most practical,” cellist Sandy Wilson told me), they follow the composer’s notes, expressive markings, and tempo indications.

There are delightful discoveries along the way, such as the viola’s phrasing of the last bar of the “Alla danza tedesca” in Opus 130, which makes it sound like an infinitely gentle, subtle homage to Bach, or the satisfactions they find in using first endings throughout.

The Alexanders perform on the Ellen M. Egger quartet of stringed instruments, built in 1987 by the American maker Francis Kuttner—it is hard to imagine a set of instruments more suitable to the quartet’s interpretive approach. The spare, elegant sound of the instruments is as equal to the immense technical challenges of the tumultuous scherzos and fugues—the Alexanders have a unique ability to differentiate entrances in fugal passages without disrupting the music’s flow—as to spinning poetry from Beethoven’s often epigrammatic melodic lines.

Maybe it’s just Beethoven catching me at a perfect moment in time—he is so protean a composer that committing to a relationship with his quartets is for many a challenging, but ultimately deeply meaningful, experience. Th is is true about both players and audiences, and in this way they are forever intimately connected. Kudos to the Alexanders for making it so clear. —Laurence Vittes

Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto, Piano Trios Nos. 1 & 2. Leonidas Kavakos, soloist and conductor with Camerata Salzburg (Sony 88697-433032)

The 200th anniversary year of Felix Mendelssohn’s death has passed, but the celebrations of his music continue. On this album, violinist Leonidas Kavakos pays homage to Mendelssohn in three major works while serving as soloist, chamber musician, and conductor of Camerata Salzburg, of which he is artistic director. Winner of several prestigious international competitions, Kavakos is a superb virtuoso with a strikingly beautiful, vibrant tone ideally suited to the lyrical songfulness and dramatic ardor of Mendelssohn’s romanticism.

Taking great liberties with tempo and rhythm, he makes the concerto’s first movement fast and driving, but slows down drastically for the second theme. The second movement is quite slow, dreamy, somewhat overphrased, and sentimental. The finale is light, graceful, speedy, sometimes breathless, but perfectly clear. The orchestra sounds a little shrill: careful to bring out thematic lines, it sometimes covers the soloist.

In the trios, with cellist Patrick Demengas and pianist Enrico Pace, the ensemble could not be more unanimous in spirit and execution, despite the players’ widely varying national backgrounds—a Greek violinist, a Swiss cellist, an Italian pianist. Even the notoriously tricky balance is excellent, and the sound is surprisingly homogeneous, thanks mostly to the pianist’s lovely, singing tone, careful voicing and smooth legato. Th e first trio’s opening has an agitated, brooding melancholy, the second’s a sense of ominous drama. The slow movements sing serenely and ecstatically; the scherzos fly by on gossamer wings, but too fast. The finales start in high-voltage tension and end in a burst of triumphant glory.

These brilliant, committed performances are among the best of the year-long Mendelssohn tributes. —Edith Eisler

Joe Bushkin Quartet, featuring Stuff Smith: Live Embers, 1964 and c. 1966 Violin Solos (AB Fable 022)

Here is another great Stuff Smith fi nd from British jazz collector Anthony Barnett. Th e bulk of this rare material is from a tape of a relaxed performance at a jazz club (dig the banter) recorded in 1964. Pianist and trumpeter Joe Bushkin led a mainstream jazz trio (recorded here with drumming great Jo Jones) that served as an excellent accompaniment to the pioneering jazz violinist Stuff Smith (five cuts are without violin). Smith slashes away with his sometimes percussive, highly rhythmic bowing.

You get the impression that his bow hair must be shredded by the end of a typical improvisational foray.

Dig his definitive jazz vibrato and the way he stretches slides into complex expressions. Has anyone ever swung any harder? His electric tone can best be described in the words of author Duncan McLean as “sandpaper with honey.”

Yeah, man.

The final 14-plus-minute cut, a home recording made in Copenhagen sometime around 1966, features the unaccompanied Smith stringing together some his own mostly slower compositions with a never completed, larger suite in mind.

If you’re not familiar with this label’s Violin Improvisation Series, I urge you to visit the label’s website (abar.net) for a list of the rare jazz CDs that are available, all made as a labor of love and printed in limited runs. —Stacy Phillips

Rhymes & Reasons. Catherine Fraser and Duncan Smith. (Cromarty 091, catherinefraser.com)

The striking Irish string-band music on Rhymes & Reasons, by fiddler Catherine Fraser and pianist Duncan Smith, grabs you from the first long note of “Larach Alasdair” and never lets go. The 11 reels, jigs, and airs include traditional Celtic tunes and three originals. Guests include cellist Natalie Haas and fiddler Hanneke Cassel. Beautiful music, richly recorded, and played magnificently. —Greg Cahill

Wendy Warner Plays Popper and Piatigorsky. Wendy Warner, cello, Eileen Buck, piano. (Cedille Records 90000 111)

Wendy Warner is a terrific cellist. Recipient of the Avery Fisher Career Grant, student and protegé of Mstislav Rostropovich, she has enjoyed a flourishing international career since winning his competition in 1990. The program recorded here—Popper’s Suite for Cello and Piano, Op. 69; Three Pieces, Op. 11; Im Walde (In the Forest), Op. 50; and Piatigorsky’s Variations on a Paganini T eme—is tailored to her strengths: her effortless and exuberant virtuosity, beautiful tone, and ardent, but restrained, romanticism.

Of the two great cellists whose works are featured on this disc, David Popper, born in Prague, but long active in Hungary, was the more renowned and prolific composer. His music abounds with lovely melodies, surprisingly daring, chromatic harmonies, felicitous modulations, and, of course, technical fireworks. Warner tosses all these off with relish and also brings out the contrasting character and moods of the pieces with simple expressiveness.

Ukranian-born Gregory Piatigorsky spent most of his life in Germany and America teaching and playing solo and chamber music with such partners as Schnabel and Heifetz. He was renowned for his charm and wit, both of which are on full display in his Variations on a Paganini Theme, the 24th caprice, which has inspired composers from Brahms to the present. Piatigorsky’s 15 variations, each shorter than two minutes, capture the styles and personalities of his famous friends and colleagues.

The piece is grand fun and Warner plays it to the hilt, negotiating its formidable technical obstacles with aplomb.

Pianist Eileen Buck’s empathetic support and remarkably singing tone contribute greatly to the performances. —E.E.

Transfigurations. Christopher Rouse’s String Chamber. The Calder Quartet (E1 7757)

The LA-based Calder Quartet—Benjamin Jacobson, Andrew Bulbrook, violins; Jonathan Moerschel, viola; Eric Byers, cello—is dedicated to championing living composers. It has collaborated with Christopher Rouse since 2002, premiering his two quartets on stage and disc. He is writing his third quartet for the group.

The players show admirable courage in tackling these works because Rouse calls his first quartet, composed in 1981 when he was an angry young man of 32, “17 minutes of rage.” Though written in homage to Bartók, the piece emulates only the harsh aspect of his style, with slashing chords, aggressive attacks, and sound eff ects like glissando and ponticello.

Beginning with a recurring pattern of rapidly repeated open strings, its dense, dissonant rhythmic unisons and short notes require such violent scratching that pitches are barely distinguishable. The instruments never sing a lyrical line, and never sound like a string quartet. Its five connected movements are all fast and loud. A slow epilogue memorializes Anwar el-Sadat, assassinated in 1981, using the assassinated Egyptian leader’s initials as notes.

The players handle this brutal music with untiring energy, authority, and aplomb. The second quartet, written in 1988 after Rouse visited Russia, is dedicated to its people. Mostly slow, bleak, and mournful, the work honors Shostakovich, incorporating his initials, as he often did himself. The performers display their imagination and tone control in its sustained, soft chords, and near-melodious lines, its contrasts of register and dynamics, and its sound effects. Rouse composed the septet “Compline,” scored a la Ravel, in 1996 following a trip to Rome. Th e players revel in the instrumental colors and soaring solos depicting the city’s sunny gaiety, while its bustle is reflected in busy, endlessly repeated figures. —E.E.

SOMETHING TO SING ABOUT

During the past few decades, ensembles as diverse as the Turtle Island String Quartet, Black Swan Quartet, Uptown String Quartet, and Quartet San Francisco have greatly modifi ed our notions of the string quartet, bending and mixing genres, reinvigorating improvisation, undertaking unconventional collaborations, and re-imagining traditional and vernacular tunes in purely instrumental concert settings.

Now comes the Real Vocal String Quartet (violinists and vocalists Irene Sazer and Alisa Rose, violist and vocalist Dina Maccabee, and cellist and vocalist Jessica Ivry), whose eponymous debut recording on Flower Note Records (rvsq.com) demonstrates the ultimate circling back to musical roots by fusing uncommonly polished string-quartet playing with haunting, expressive singing by the quartet members.

The range of material is wide, from original compositions and improvisations by the quartet members to settings of New York pop, Brazilian choro, Kenyan traditional lyre, and Appalachian fiddling. But this is neither post-modern gumbo nor high-art reworking— the spirit animating this CD, to my mind, is that of folk legend Pete Seeger. These musicians sound as if they have openly and conscientiously explored musical cultures outside their own, enthusiastically embraced these influences, and are expressing their pleasure without overthinking such matters as authenticity and social context.

The playing and singing is gorgeous, the flow of the recording is like a river, and even when the mood is dark, they’re absorbed and having fun. And they want you to have fun, too. —David A. Lusterman