Zehetmair Quartet - Schumann: String Quartets 1&3 (2003)

Having established himself as a soloist by the time he was 40, Austrian violinist Thomas Zehetmair defeated the midlife crisis by finding new fields to conquer. He branched out into conducting and, in 1997, formed a string quartet, which has already performed widely in Europe and America and released two CDs; this is the second. (The first featured works by Bartók and Karl Amadeus Hartmann.) Zehetmair's reputation was always based not only on his wide-ranging, adventurous repertoire, and unbridled temperament, but also on his idiosyncratic style and interpretive eccentricities, and he brings all these qualities to his quartet playing. He has chosen partners who are very good players and presumably kindred spirits, but they all pursue other activities as well and, moreover, do not live in the same city. Thus, their rehearsal time is limited, and they say they make the most of it by rehearsing, performing, and recording entirely from memory. Indeed, their intonation and ensemble are excellent, but this is not--or at least not yet--a unified quartet. The personalities have not merged, the tone lacks homogeneity, the balance is poor, the texture muddy, important details are lost. Instead of letting their solos emerge from a seamlessly woven tapestry of lines, the players tend to be too assertive or too subdued. Zehetmair's influence is clear in the tonal and musical excesses. Though he himself can produce a sweet, floating tone, the sound is predominantly rough and scratchy; tempi are erratic, often hectic, rhythms unsteady, dynamics exaggerated. -- Edith Eisler