Given the modest size of the audience for chamber music in the U.S., the country has produced a remarkable number of world-class string quartets dating back to the 1960s. Now comes the
Dover Quartet, which formed at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute in 2008 and has gained wide acclaim for a cycle of
Beethoven quartets that concludes with this
third volume. It covers the late quartets, plus the
Grosse Fuge, Op. 133, originally attached to the
String Quartet No. 13 in B flat major, Op. 130, but later published by
Beethoven as an independent work. The
Great Fugue is a technically perilous piece with a contrapuntal energy that seems to overflow the boundaries of the decorous string quartet medium, and it makes a good place to begin appreciating the virtues of the
Dover Quartet's performances. The performance is precise, with no sign of strain. In general, precision is a major attraction here, with perfect intonation and a wealth of small detail, but precision doesn't foreclose a certain lightness that is particularly appropriate in the late quartets, built as they often are from seemingly artless tunes. The
Dover Quartet never overdoes the slow movements, letting a piece like the Lydian-mode "Prayer of a Recovered Person to the Godhead" in the
String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, Op. 132, speak for itself rather than freighting it with retrospective notions of transcendence. Of the existing
Beethoven cycles, this one perhaps follows most closely to that of the
Emerson Quartet, but it has a flavor of its own. The
Cedille label provides unfussy engineering from an auditorium at Goshen College in Indiana. ~ James Manheim
