The Times

4 April 2000

 

CHAMBER

Beethoven String Quartets Op 18 Brodsky Quartet Vanguard Classics 99212 via the Complete Record Company

Hilary Finch

 

THE Brodsky Beethoven project, recently live at London's Canary Wharf is now documented for posterity. The idea was to commission six living composers to write a new quartet each “in discussion with” the six quartets of Beethoven's Op 18, to celebrate the bicentenary of these milestones.

 

Six composers strode out where angels might have feared to tread. All offer technically fluent and imaginative responses to their Beethovenian counterparts. All ­including the Beethoven originals - are played with intense commitment by the ever-enterprising Brodskys.

 

The oldest composer the 52-year-old Dmitri Smirnov has the newest things to say.  He draws a nocturnal portrait of Beethoven, and then imagines him as master of ceremonies at a masked ball of his musical predecessors and successors.

 

Sally Beamish makes an artful and arresting fusion of short passages from the first movement (of Op 18 No 4 with a new "opened-up" language of her own, influenced by 20th century American writing  to create a lively angle on the master.