Str Qrts [Import]

The Zehetmair Quartett transfixes the listener with a truly exhilarating performance of Bartók's String Quartet No.4 of 1928 on this ECM disc. You can imagine the gypsies dancing as the group's steely sound grips the air and refuses to let go. The microphones are close enough to hear the players sweat: the dramatic exhalation in the last bar of the first movement betrays their driving intensity. Their sul ponticello playing in the whirlwind second has an eerie metallic magic. The slow kernel shows off Françoise Groben's lachrymose cello. The wonderfully articulate pizzicato fourth spits with angry eastern inflection and the hard, pounding finale stamps home in wild delirium. The companion work is the German composer Karl Amadeus Hartmann's String Quartet No.1 op.1, "Carillon", which won Geneva's Carillon competition in 1936. Hartmann later withdrew the work as he pursued an anti-Nazi policy of inner exile. This was perhaps just as well. A muted viola opens with a melodic dirge which stings into a furious charge bolstered by chords of icy crispness. The middle movement con sordino is a tense drama of whistling-kettle harmonics and low, fearful shiverings. The irate finale has chords like leather fists and a driving, accelerating passion which certainly would not have endeared him to his country's murderous politicians. --Rick Jones