Customer Reviews

Beethoven String Quartets Op. 127 & 132

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Ouch... not much love for the Hagens here on Amazon. Pity.

There are enough recordings, particularly of Beethoven quartets, that there is something for everybody. Yes, for many the standard Beethoven tradition lies with quartets such as the Guarneri, Vermeer, and Alban Berg, or further back with the Budapest and Busch quartets. Some friends of mine swear by the Cleveland Qt, and others are smitten with the new Artemis cycle. All have their merits, and it's not for me to tell someone what they like to hear.

What can be a bit tiresome though is sitting through the same interpretations over and over, and for some of us the chance to hear a fresh spin on the old war horses is more than welcome. Enter the Hagen Quartet. The Hagens have been recording Beethoven off and on for the past three decades now and their approach has stayed relatively the same: lean and direct, with fleet tempos and less vibrato. Think of them as a quartet version of the historically informed performance practice interpreters of Beethoven symphonies, such as Gardiner, Mackerras, Abbado, etc. Understandably, this evokes some passionate vitriol from folks that like their Beethoven on the meaty side, or from people looking for Furtwangler-esque spirituality in the late quartets. There are lots of recordings like those out there, and this is not one of them.

Also, I'm not quite sure where all these remarks about technical ineptitude are coming from. Nobody who listens to a lot of Beethoven is going to mistake Lukas Hagen for Arnold Steinhardt or Shmuel Ashkenasi, but this is far tighter ensemble playing than virtually any Beethoven recordings I have heard, and I've heard just about them all. At any rate, if you like Beethoven that is crisp, streamlined, and well-executed then this is a really fantastic recording, as are the rest of the Hagen's Beethoven and Schubert discs.

You can play fast and still make music, or you can play fast by skimming the notes. The Hagen Quartet evidently opted for the latter approach in their rendition of Op. 127. Consequently, while the recorded sound is fairly good, the HQ interpretation of Op. 127 faded into the background and didn't engage me in an active listening process. I doubt I will come back to it with much frequency.

I'm listening to Op. 131 while I type this, and it is a stronger effort than Op. 127. Still, though, nothing stands out to recommend the interpretations on this disc over the many, many excellent performances available from other quartets, both modern and historical.

It's hard to make Muzak out of late Beethoven, but the Hagens seem determined to smooth out all of the composer's most jagged, daring and risky ideas. Every movement here is underplayed, which came as quite a surprise to me. I had associated the Hagen Qt. with edgy, self-conscious, often aggressive interpretations. Here they merrily zip along the surface -- listen to the brief Alla marcia fourth movement of Op. 132 -- in a way that even the fleet, modernist Emerson Qt. doesn't.

Perhaps the intent was to make Beethoven sound more "classical," a category his late works hardly fit into. One expects maximum intensity in the Adagio of Op. 132, but to the Hagens Beethoven's great hymn of praise is a pastoral stroll. Everyone's entitled to their opinion about Beethoven style nowadays, but to my ears these readings come dangerously close to trivialization.

Just heard this Op 127 of theirs, and Lord, how rushed, and consequently inept, some of the playing sounds in the important moments. Esp the last movement. (Ensemble, intonation, attacks, clarity, etc. etc.)
If you are going to try and be interpretatively serious about these tempi, then you gotta practice a lot more than they have, evidently. Very weird, and with so much competition!
Now, it is not *that* rushed, so the bottom line may be that the Hagen simply are not technically quite competitive with the best of their peers, and they perhaps do not realize we are in a Golden Age of quartet playing.
Much lovely and astute playing elsewhere and momentarily throughout, but to smear / smoosh the loud high-drama congested moments settles it for me.