The three works for string quartet by Anton Webern that were published in his lifetime – the Five Movements Op 5, Six Bagatelles Op 9, and the Op 28 String Quartet – add up to less than 25 minutes’ music, short measure for a recording. Finding a complement for these elusive, drastically compressed pieces is tricky – alongside them, the string quartets by his teacher Schoenberg, for instance, seem positively indulgent and overblown. So the Richter Ensemble has opted for a work that is equally spare and even more enigmatic, Bach’s The Art of Fugue.
There is no definitive version of The Art of Fugue; Bach seems to have composed it over the last 10 years of life to satisfy himself, not envisaging performances or specifying what instruments it might be performed by (though the layout of the music does suggest that it was conceived for a harpsichord), and adding pieces and reordering their sequence before the score was published. The Richter Ensemble opt to play 16 movements, varying the instrumentation for some of them by adding a violone and a harpsichord to the basic string quartet, who play on gut strings at baroque pitch, and interleaving them in groups between the Webern works, which are included chronologically. Their sequence ends with Bach’s final number, Contrapunctus XIV, which may have been intended as a quadruple fugue but which remained unfinished at his death; they present it exactly as Bach left it, breaking off mid-phrase.
The recordings of both works are warm and very immediate, matching the performances well. There’s nothing ascetic about the Richter approach to Webern’s almost aphoristic writing, while every entry in Bach’s fugal tour de force is characterised with enormous care. The contrast between the two works well, but though they were recorded in different locations, there is a curious background rumble to the performances that is definitely a bit more than ambience or atmosphere; it becomes positively intrusive in the empty spaces of the Webern especially, and rather takes the shine off an otherwise thoughtfully designed and superbly performed disc.
This week’s other pick
The latest Harmonia Mundi disc from Cuarteto Casals is also devoted to Bach’s The Art of Fugue, and provides a fascinating contrast with the Richter Ensemble’s performance. The Casals do not play the inversions of Contrapunctus XII and XIII, but do add four canons to the sequence that the Richter omit, as well as offering their own completion of the final fugue and including the chorale prelude Vor deinen Thron tret’ ich as a postscript. The Casals’ performances seem cooler and more austere, but they unfold each movement with marvellous clarity.
