# 100 Favorites: # 39



## JACE (Jul 18, 2014)

*Ives: String Quartets Nos. 1 & 2
Juilliard String Quartet (Sony)*










From my Ives site:

_These are exceptional [recordings], and they easily receive my highest recommendation. To my ears, no one performs the Second String Quartet with the same sense of hushed intensity and fierce confrontation as the Juilliard Quartet. In the first movement, "Discussions," the Juilliard players bring a questing quality to the music--even as the music seems to be unravelling. In this reading, there is a definite sense of barriers being broken, of alienation, and loneliness. The second movement, "Arguments," ups the ante. Here the playing is even more fierce. No other quartet is nearly as forceful and compelling as the Juilliard Quartet. The sounds are wonderfully vivid, even phantasmic, but never impersonal or bombastic. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of this recording is the third movement, "The Call of the Mountains." Again, a questing, exploratory quality comes to the fore. I hear Ives trying to forge some kind of connection between the old and the new; the traditional and the modern; popular and classical; the earth and the heavens, and every sort of irreconcilable. And it all builds to an incredible climax of cosmic grandeur. In other recordings, these final moments of the work--its apotheosis--seem tacked on, an afterthought. Here it seems natural, even inevitable. Extraordinary. The First String Quartet is nearly as good as the as the Second. The Juilliard String Quartet's reading may lack some of the improvisatory spontaneity of the Concord Quartet's recording (on Nonesuch, LP only), but it's certainly effective, and it's compelling on its own terms._

The Sony disc pictured above -- the version that I own -- is now out of print; however, the performance is readily available on a 2013 Newton Classics reissue.










The photograph on the CD cover might look vaguely familiar.


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