String Quartets – Signum Quartet

Three composers, three “No. 3“s, three entirely different reasons for writing a string quartet at all. The Signum Quartet has built a shrewd little anthology out of the coincidence, and the playing justifies the conceit on musical rather than merely numerological grounds.

Start with the Berg, because everything else on this disc argues with it, consciously or not. Written in 1910, when the composer was barely into his twenties and still afraid of disappointing his teacher, the String Quartet No. 3 is op. 3. It sounds like nothing else from that moment in Vienna — not quite atonal, not quite anything, hovering in that threshold world before Schoenberg’s pupils committed to the twelve tones. Schoenberg’s own verdict — “fullness and unconstraint,” “considerable originality” — reads today less like a teacher’s pride than like a man watching a door open onto a room he hadn’t yet decided to enter himself.

The Signum players understand this ambiguity. Kerstin Dill’s first violin bends pitch at phrase-ends in a way that is not quite portamento, not quite inflection — an expressive smudging that lets dissonance arrive as sigh rather than shock. There’s a passage in the second movement where the viola, Xandi van Dijk playing with real dark-grained tone, pushes up under the violins in close canon, and the effect is less argument than embrace. Berg himself, hearing it played well years later in Salzburg, spoke of its “melodiousness and solemn sweetness.” That’s what you get here. Nothing jagged. Nothing that announces its own modernity. It sounds like late Mahler filtered through a prism that hasn’t decided what color it wants to be.

Whether that’s historically honest is a separate question. Audiences in 1911 had Brahms quartets as their working definition of chamber music; I suspect they heard something far stranger than what reaches us now. Time does this to pieces — sands them down, or rather sands us down until we can no longer feel the original cut.

Bartók’s Third, from 1927, gets a reading of real ferocity, rightly so: this is arguably the most compressed, violent fifteen minutes in his output. Bartók himself called it his most difficult quartet to bring off. The architecture is relentless, four connected sections collapsing into each other with scarcely a breath between. The Signum attacks the Seconda parte with an almost aggressive physicality — bow hair audibly fraying against string, you’d swear, in the stamping ostinato passages — and then turns on a dime for the eerie, glassy sul ponticello writing that follows. Thomas Schmitz’s cello has an unusually dry, percussive attack throughout, which suits Bartók’s folk-inflected brutality better than a rounder, more Romantic cello tone would. I’ve heard the Takács bring more structural inevitability to this score, and the old Hungarian Quartet recordings still have an authority of idiom that’s hard to match. But for sheer visceral impact, this version holds its own.

Then Schnittke, 1983: polystylism as controlled chaos, quotations and ghosts of Shostakovich and Beethoven’s late quartets drifting through the texture like static on an old radio signal. Heard blind, this is the piece I’d have guessed was written decades before Berg’s — not because it sounds old-fashioned but because its fragments of tonality feel nostalgic, haunted, whereas Berg’s quartet still sounds like it’s discovering harmony for the first time. The Signum lean into the work’s theatrical bleakness without overplaying the irony; the famous Shostakovich DSCH-adjacent motif emerges and submerges without being underlined in red pen, which is the correct choice. Too many performances of late Schnittke turn into exercises in gesture-pointing. This one trusts the material.

Intonation throughout the disc is superb — genuinely clean unisons in the Bartók’s most exposed octave writing, where ensembles routinely come unstuck — and the recorded balance favors interior clarity over hall bloom, which suits all three works. If I have a reservation it’s that the group’s house sound occasionally flattens the stylistic distance between these pieces that the program is designed to illuminate. That’s a minor complaint against a disc played with intelligence, nerve, and, in the Berg especially, real tenderness.

Recommended. Worth hearing for what it reveals about how differently we now hear music that once scandalized rooms full of people in evening dress.