Rózsa Chamber Music by ASV Ensemble

Rózsa’s Chamber Music: Out from Hollywood’s Shadow

The trouble with being brilliant at something lucrative is that people assume you can’t possibly be serious about anything else. Miklós Rózsa wrote Ben-Hur and Double Indemnity—scores that defined Hollywood’s golden age—so the concert hall establishment spent decades politely ignoring his quartets and concertos. This ASV release makes a strong case that we’ve been missing something substantial.

The String Quartet No. 1, completed in 1950, announces itself immediately as the work of a composer who thinks big. Opening with variations rather than sonata form—always a risky gambit—Rózsa builds an architecture that feels both expansive and taut. The material has that Magyar intensity you hear in Bartók, but filtered through a different sensibility. Less angular, perhaps. More prone to long-breathed melody.

That slow movement, the Lento, deserves its reputation. Christopher Palmer knew what he was doing when he later arranged it for string orchestra—it’s the kind of music that seems to expand naturally into larger forces. But hearing it here in its original quartet incarnation, you appreciate the intimacy, the way the four voices wind around each other in searching chromatic lines. The Flesch Quartet finds the right balance between intensity and restraint. Philippa Ibbotson’s first violin sings without pushing, and Robert Gibbs’s viola adds that necessary dark underpinning.

The scherzo “in modo ongarese” snaps and crackles with folk energy, though Rózsa’s Hungary is already filtered through decades of exile, remembered rather than lived. Still, the rhythmic bite is there, and the Flesch players dig into those asymmetrical accents with evident relish.

What strikes you about the Second Quartet, written thirty-one years later, is the compression. Everything is more concentrated, more essential. The thematic relationships between movements aren’t just clever—they’re structural, binding the whole work into an organic unity that the First Quartet, for all its beauties, doesn’t quite achieve. You can hear Rózsa working at the height of his powers here, the formal mastery absolute but worn lightly.

The slow movement of Op. 38 is particularly fine—spare, almost austere at times, building to moments of real anguish before subsiding. The Flesch Quartet catches that quality of inward meditation, resisting any temptation toward Hollywood lushness. And when the scherzo arrives (third movement this time), it’s leaner, more acerbic than its counterpart in the First Quartet. Age had sharpened Rózsa’s edges.

The Sonata for Two Violins makes an apt coupling—lighter in spirit, yes, but no less accomplished. Composed in 1933, revised forty years later, it shows Rózsa already in command of his materials. The Bartók Duos are an obvious reference point, but Rózsa’s approach is more expansive, more traditionally lyrical. Ibbotson and Mark Denman, the two violinists, find a nice balance between ensemble precision and individual character. Their intonation in those exposed double-stop passages is admirably secure.

The recordings, made in two different churches a few months apart, are warm and present without being overly reverberant. St. Silas in Kentish Town and Holy Trinity in Weston both provide sympathetic acoustics—you hear the instruments clearly, but there’s enough ambient bloom to keep the sound from becoming clinical.

ASV has done important work here. These aren’t curiosities or footnotes to Rózsa’s film career—they’re serious, substantial pieces that deserve a place in the quartet repertoire. The Second Quartet especially strikes me as a major achievement, comparable to the best mid-century chamber works. The Flesch Quartet plays with conviction and technical assurance throughout. One hopes, as the original reviewer does, for more: the String Trio, the Piano Quintet. But even standing alone, this disc makes its point. Rózsa the concert composer deserves our attention.

Strongly recommended. This is music that rewards repeated listening, revealing more of its craft and emotional depth each time through.