Horneman String Quartets – Arild String Quartet

Blood tells, or so the Copenhagen musical dynasties of the nineteenth century liked to believe. Cousins marrying cousins, aunts producing composer nephews, the whole apparatus of provincial genius sustaining itself through family dinners rather than conservatories. Out of that hothouse came two men whose names now mean nothing to most concertgoers, though Grieg thought enough of one of them to keep up a correspondence, and Berlioz took the other seriously enough to encourage him in Paris.

Dacapo has made something of a specialty out of excavating this material, and to their credit they never oversell it. This new disc — the Arild Quartet’s first commercial recording, astonishingly, after a decade and a half together — puts two Horneman quartets either side of a Hamerik fragment, and the sequencing does real interpretive work. You hear the difference in temperament immediately.

The G minor quartet is the discovery here, if “discovery” isn’t too strong a word for something written when its composer was barely out of his teens. Horneman was nineteen, maybe twenty, when he wrote it, and there’s none of the tentativeness you’d expect. The first movement has a taut, almost Mendelssohnian control of argument. But it’s the andante that stops you cold — a long-breathed melody handed from first violin to cello and back, harmonized with a chromatic wistfulness that has no business coming from someone that young. Tobias Durholm phrases it without sentimentality, which is the right choice. Oversell this music and it collapses into salon sweetness. He doesn’t.

The D major quartet, two years later, is a lesser piece and everyone involved seems to know it. Shorter, sunnier, more conventionally four-square in its formal joints. It reminded me, as it apparently reminded others, of Nielsen’s quartets in their less troubled moments, though Nielsen wouldn’t arrive on the scene for another generation. That’s not a knock so much as a genealogical observation. Danish string quartet writing had a sound before Nielsen codified it, and Horneman got there first, or at least got there alongside.

Then the Hamerik. Six minutes, maybe a torso of something larger, we don’t know. The documentation trails off exactly where you want it to continue. What’s left is an ostinato-driven scrap with real rhythmic bite, the kind of thing that would make a terrific encore if any quartet besides this one ever played it. Hamerik wrote almost no chamber music at all (the C minor piano quintet is the only other substantial entry), so this is a curiosity rather than a case for reassessment. Still, it’s a delightful curiosity, and the Arild players attack it with an energy that borders on mischief. Ingemar Brantelid’s cello line has real snap under the ostinato, not just dutiful support.

Ensemble sound: warm, close-set, occasionally too reverberant, the kind of bloom that makes you wonder whether the room did all the work or whether someone leaned on a reverb plug-in afterward. I’d rather have had drier, more analytical sound for music this transparently constructed. You want to hear the inner voices articulate, and occasionally they blur.

Inger Sørensen’s notes, as you’d expect from Horneman’s biographer, are dense and well-sourced without turning academic. Good. This repertoire needs an advocate who knows where the bodies are buried, genealogically and otherwise.

Is there a rival version? Not really, which is rather the point of a disc like this. Nobody else has recorded either Horneman quartet, so the Arild’s performances are, by default, the standard, a strange position for a debut album to occupy, arriving fully formed as the reference. They earn it. Committed, unfussy playing, intelligent enough to let the music’s occasional callowness show without apologizing for it. Recommended, with real warmth, to anyone who thought they already knew everything Denmark had to offer between Hartmann and Nielsen. They didn’t.