Dvorak: Cypresses and String Quartet No. 13 – Cypress String Qu

Somewhere in the engineering booth for this disc, a decision got made that first violinist Cecily Ward should sound like she’s playing on the surface of the sun. Everyone else in the Cypress Quartet appears to be recorded in some warmer, more forgiving acoustic — a living room, maybe, with the curtains drawn. It’s a strange sensation, and not a pleasant one, and it undermines what is otherwise a serious, often thrilling account of Dvořák’s String Quartet No. 13 in G major, op. 106.

Credit first. Dvořák wrote this quartet in the autumn of 1895, freshly returned from America, relieved to be home in Bohemia. You can hear the relief in the music. It sprawls, it digresses, it keeps starting over as if the composer can’t quite believe he’s allowed to write however long a movement he wants. The Cypress players understand this expansiveness. Their first movement has genuine sweep, the kind that risks incoherence and mostly avoids it. Tempos press forward without ever feeling rushed. There’s an unbuttoned, almost improvisatory quality to the phrasing.

The scherzo’s trio, though — that’s where the players oversell it. Aggression is fine; Dvořák invites some of that snap and bite, especially in music this rhythmically restless. But there’s a difference between attack and assault, and a couple of times these musicians cross the line, digging into string crossings with a vehemence that reads as effortful rather than exciting.

And that brings me back to the balance problem, because it compounds everything. Ward’s Stradivarius — a lovely instrument, no argument there — gets shoved so far forward in the mix, so brightly lit, that everything above the staff turns glassy, almost brittle. Climaxes that should feel thrilling instead feel like they’re happening behind glass, or under fluorescent light. I don’t believe for a second the quartet actually sounds like this in a concert hall. I’ve heard them live. This is a production choice, a mixing-board decision, and to my ears it’s the wrong one, made, I’d guess, in the interest of clarity but achieving the opposite: fatigue after twenty minutes, and a faint headache by the finale.

Which is a shame, because there’s real interpretive intelligence here, and it deserves better company. Compare the Pavel Haas Quartet’s reading, which manages the same fire without the glare. Or the young Cecilia Quartet, whose recent recordings of this repertoire have a tonal blend so natural you forget four separate people are up there sawing away. Truly, seek out the Cecilia Quartet. They are doing something special right now, and not enough people know it. Next to either, the Cypress account, however committed, sounds under-produced in exactly the way that matters.

Cypresses, B. 152, gets the generous, unhurried treatment: twelve short love songs, originally set for voice and piano back in 1865 when Dvořák was twenty-four and hopelessly infatuated with an actress named Josefina Čermáková, later arranged for string quartet decades after the fact, stripped of words but not of longing. This is intimate salon music at heart, miniatures, nothing symphonic about it, and the playing here is unforced, songful, content to breathe. No. 9, “Ye Cypresses, Tall and Slender, Ask” — the disc anglicizes it simply as “My dearest one” — gives violist Ethan Filner and cellist Jennifer Kloetzel gorgeous, dark-grained solos, phrased with real tenderness.

But even here the engineering intrudes. Ward’s line, meant to sit inside a conversational texture with the second violin, instead sits on top of it. Tomás Cotik’s contributions get swallowed whole in several of these songs, reduced to harmonic filler rather than an equal voice. Dvořák wrote these as duets of the soul, essentially. You shouldn’t be able to forget one of the duettists is even there.

I don’t say any of this happily. There’s nothing wrong with this ensemble’s musicianship, and much that’s right with it, nothing wrong either with their evident devotion to a composer whose interior life gets shortchanged too often in favor of the symphonies and concertos. But a listener has to fight the sound to get to the music, and life’s too short, and the catalog too full of alternatives. Adjust your treble control if you must; some relief is possible. Better, though, to spend your money on the Pavel Haas, or better still, the Cecilia, and wait for the Cypress Quartet to find an engineer who loves all four of them equally.