Schubert String Quartet D887 – Wihan Quartet

Something happens around bar 40 of the opening Allegro molto moderato — that shudder of tremolo strings under the wind-band unison — that tells you Schubert already knows he’s dying, though 1826 gave him two more years to work it out on paper. The Wihan Quartet understands this. They don’t rush past it, the way some ensembles do, eager to get to the tune. They let the tremolo breathe, let it register as dread rather than mere accompaniment.

This is a group out of Prague, heirs by geography if not lineage to a tradition of Czech quartet playing that runs through the old Smetana and Janáček ensembles: that dark, woody tone, vibrato used sparingly and for expressive punctuation rather than as a constant bath of sound. It suits Schubert’s G major Quartet uncommonly well. This is not a work that wants glamour. It wants weight.

Schumann’s phrase “heavenly length” gets trotted out for the C major Symphony mostly, but it applies here with even more justice, because the quartet medium makes forty-five minutes of sustained argument a much riskier proposition than it is for full orchestra. Four solo lines, nowhere to hide. The first movement alone runs past 20 minutes in some performances. The Wihan don’t dawdle, but neither do they hurry the modulatory writing that seems to want to test how far from G major Schubert can wander before the ear loses its bearings entirely, deep into E-flat, into strange enharmonic corners, before he finds his way home.

The slow movement is where this release earns its keep. Schubert marks it Andante un poco moto, and it’s built on that oscillation between songful calm and stabbing, almost violent climax: the cello’s simple tune interrupted by outbursts that sound, frankly, like late Beethoven eavesdropping on late Schubert, or the reverse. Pavel Verner’s cello has an appealing burr to it, not the polished sheen you’d get from, say, the Melos Quartet’s old DG recording, and it works. When the fortissimo hits, that reiterated dotted rhythm, all four instruments hammering, the engineers haven’t smoothed it over. You feel the rosin dust practically.

Scherzo: quicksilver, airborne, Mendelssohnian in the sense that Mendelssohn himself was still four years away from writing his Octet when Schubert composed this. Call it prophecy rather than influence. The trio section, a ländler with its heels planted in Austrian soil, is plainer stuff — Schubert coasting a little, honestly — but the Wihan don’t oversell it, and that’s a kind of tact.

The finale is where interpretive choices diverge most among the many recordings on disc: the Takács, the Lindsays, the venerable Melos, even the wonderful old Végh account from the ‘50s if you can find it. Some quartets play up the tarantella’s manic quality until it turns grotesque, nearly Mahlerian. The Wihan take the operatic route instead, all buffa sparkle, triplets tossed off with real wit. It’s a legitimate choice. Schubert wrote comic operas nobody performs anymore, and you can hear that sensibility bleeding through here: the finale as opera buffa without the singers.

As for the Quartettsatz — that lonely torso from 1820, abandoned after one movement and a fragment of a second — it’s often treated as filler, and here it is billed as a coupling, but the rendition refuses to treat it that way. The turbulent opening, all agitated tremolo and chromatic anxiety, gets real bite; the lyrical second subject unspools with unforced tenderness. Nine minutes and forty-five seconds of Schubert already sounding like a composer who has seen something the rest of us haven’t.

Sound matters enormously in this repertoire, and here the engineering deserves its own paragraph. Close enough to hear bow changes, distant enough that the acoustic has room to bloom, no spotlighting, no unnatural balance favoring first violin over the rest, which happens more often than it should in quartet recordings. Whoever set up the microphones for this session understood chamber music is a conversation among equals, not a concerto with three accompanists.

Does this unseat the classic recordings — Melos, or the Takács on Decca, or for those who like a leaner, more period-inflected sound, the Mosaïques? Not entirely. There is no unseating a work this rich; different quartets simply illuminate different rooms of the same house. But the Wihan belong in that company now, no question. This is playing of intelligence, tonal beauty, and patience. Very warmly recommended.