Tchaikovsky: String Quartets Nos. 1 and 3
St Lawrence String Quartet
EMI Classics CDC5 57144 [69:42]
The St Lawrence Quartet has established itself—on the evidence of their previous Schumann disc—as an ensemble worth taking seriously. This Tchaikovsky pairing confirms that impression, though not without certain caveats that need addressing.
Tchaikovsky’s genius for string writing is beyond dispute. Whether marshaling orchestral forces or working within chamber music’s intimate confines, he understood how to make strings sing, how to exploit their capacity for both ardor and introspection. The St Lawrence players grasp this duality instinctively. Their approach to the D major Quartet, Op. 11—that astonishing work from 1871, when Tchaikovsky was barely thirty—reveals a bitter-sweet sensibility, melancholy shadows cast across music that seems, on the surface, almost naively sunny.
But here’s the problem: the recording balance. The cello pushes too far forward in the sonic picture. Now, I’m not talking about some catastrophic engineering failure—nothing so dramatic. Yet the perspective tilts. You hear it especially in the first movement, where the ensemble’s carefully calibrated voicing gets skewed by this forwardness. The result is a richer, darker sonority than Tchaikovsky probably intended. Some listeners might prefer it. I found it distracting.
The famous “"Andante" cantabile“—that tune Tolstoy supposedly wept over—fares better. Here the quartet’s expressive unity serves them well. They don’t sentimentalize, don’t push the rubato beyond taste’s boundaries. The folk-song simplicity of the theme emerges with genuine feeling, and when the texture thickens in the variations, the ensemble maintains its poise. Still, if pressed to recommend a single recording of this quartet, I’d point you toward the Borodins on Teldec. Their interpretation has an idiomatic rightness, a sense of these melodies and harmonies as native language rather than learned dialect.
The Third Quartet is another matter entirely.
Written in 1876 as a memorial to Ferdinand Laub, the violinist who had championed Tchaikovsky’s music, this E-flat minor work inhabits darker emotional territory. The first movement alone spans nearly seventeen minutes—a real test of any quartet’s ability to sustain both tension and coherence across an extended time-span. The St Lawrence players rise to this challenge magnificently. Their pacing feels inevitable, the way the movement’s various ideas emerge and develop traced with real intelligence. You sense they’ve lived with this music, thought through its architecture.
The brief second movement—marked “"Allegro" vivo e scherzando“—darts and flickers with nervous energy. Good contrast after the first movement’s weight. Then the funeral march of the third movement resumes the tragic intensity, and here the quartet’s unanimity of purpose proves especially valuable. They understand that Tchaikovsky’s grief in this movement is public as well as private, ceremonial as well as personal.
The "finale" attempts what "finale"s in minor-key works always attempt: transformation, triumph wrested from tragedy. Tchaikovsky marks it “risoluto,” and the St Lawrence players deliver that resolution with conviction. Whether the music itself entirely succeeds in achieving the victory it claims—well, that’s a question about the composition, not the performance. These players make the strongest possible case.
The recording quality in the Third Quartet is markedly better than in the First. The balance issues that plagued the D major work have been resolved—or perhaps the different character of the E-flat minor piece simply makes those issues less noticeable. Either way, the sound here serves the music rather than distorting it.
So where does this leave us? With a disc that offers one unqualified success (the Third Quartet) and one qualified success (the First). The St Lawrence Quartet plays with intelligence, technical command, and genuine musical feeling throughout. But the Borodin album on Teldec remains the benchmark—more idiomatically Russian in sound, more perfectly balanced in engineering, more inevitable in interpretation. This EMI disc is well worth hearing, particularly for the Third Quartet. Just don’t expect it to displace the competition.
