Haydn String Quartets Op 9 – Quatuor Festetics

There is a moment about four minutes into the first movement of the Quartet in D minor, op. 9 no. 4, when the cello drops out from under the texture and you realize, with something like a small shock, that Haydn has quietly rewritten the rules of what a string quartet is for. Not loudly. He never announces these things. But the four voices have stopped behaving like a first violin with rhythm-section backup — the format Haydn himself more or less invented with his early divertimenti — and started to argue, agree, interrupt one another like people at a dinner table who have known each other far too long to be polite.

That is the real story of op. 9, and it is a story the Quatuor Festetics tells with unusual intelligence, though not, I think, without a few longueurs along the way.

Founded in Budapest in the late 1970s and steeped in period performance practice, the Festetics play on gut strings with minimal vibrato, bows held in the old grip, an approach that by 1998, when this Arcana set was recorded, had already become something close to orthodoxy for eighteenth-century repertoire. I remain of two minds about that orthodoxy. Gut strings can sound papery in the wrong hands. Here they mostly don’t. The tone is lean, sinewy, occasionally raw in a way that I suspect Haydn — who complained bitterly about scratchy amateur playing throughout his life — might have found uncomfortably close to home. But the rawness has purpose. It lets you hear the harmonic joints of the music, the way Haydn splices a phrase together from unequal parts, four bars answered by six, a genuinely radical asymmetry for 1769 or so, when these quartets were composed for Haydn’s patron the Esterházys and quite possibly written with the specific players of that court in mind.

Come of age. That’s Haydn’s own later phrase for what happened in these six works, and it’s worth sitting with. He was approaching forty. He had already produced dozens of symphonies. And yet something changes here — the first violin writing grows more soloistic, almost concerto-like in its figuration, while the lower three voices are handed real argumentative weight rather than mere accompaniment.

The playing throughout CD1 has an unforced naturalness I found consistently persuasive. The Adagio of the D minor quartet — track 3, disc one — unfolds with a kind of unhurried tenderness; the opening measures breathe, the phrasing has that quality of a held breath before speech, and when the first violin takes over the melodic line the transition doesn’t jolt, it simply… arrives. Elsewhere I wanted more air between phrases. The minuets, in particular, can feel four-square, metronomic almost, missing some of the rustic lilt that period-instrument colleagues like the Mosaïques Quartet bring to comparable Haydn.

Quartet No. 1 in C major opens at a tempo slower than most modern listeners expect from a “first movement,” and the Festetics lean into that unhurried quality rather than fighting it — the phrase structure has real emotional undertow, not showy, but persistent, like a tide you don’t notice pulling until you’re well offshore. It is a wise interpretive choice. Too many quartets, hearing “Moderato” or “Allegro moderato,” rush to make the music sound busier than Haydn intended.

By contrast the finale of Quartet No. 6 in A major is pure adrenaline — an unambiguous Presto, and the only true fast tempo Haydn assigns to close out this entire set. The Festetics dig in here with real bite, the ensemble tightening like a fist, and it’s a shrewd piece of programming on Haydn’s part (whether or not he thought of it as “programming” at all) to end six quartets of predominantly measured character with something so combustive.

Sound quality: warm, reasonably intimate, recorded in a Budapest library that gives the strings a slightly resonant halo without swallowing detail. Not state-of-the-art, even by 1998 standards, but entirely serviceable, and frankly preferable to some of the closer, dryer modern-instrument recordings of this repertoire that reduce Haydn’s wit to a series of hard-edged consonants.

Should you buy it. If you already own the Salomon Quartet’s period-instrument cycle, or the Angeles Quartet’s more modern-toned survey, you may not need a third traversal of op. 9. But if you don’t know these quartets at all — and many collectors, fixated on the later opp. 76 and 77, skip past this earlier music entirely — the Festetics make as persuasive and idiomatic a case as anyone currently available. Flawed in the dance movements, luminous in the slow ones, this is a set that understands, better than most, that Haydn was already Haydn long before anyone else noticed.