The
Wihan Quartet is not Chinese or Thai but Czech, and if one is to believe the packaging, the live concerts from which this double-CD release was drawn represented the first complete cycle of the
Beethoven quartets ever performed in Prague. (How could this be, in that musically rich city?) All three groups of
Beethoven quartets -- late, middle, and now early -- were recorded and are available.The quartet's members are young, and taken individually the six early quartets in this release present various decisions with which many listeners will take issue. Many of them relate to tempo; the group is on the fast side pretty much throughout, and the Andante con moto of the String Quartet No. 3 in D major, Op. 18/3, is a very brisk walk indeed. In some of the climactic passages the music comes a bit close for comfort to the edge. Yet this set is one of those that adds up to more than the sum of its parts. The sheer enthusiasm of the performers carries them through dicey passages, and there are any number of arresting details. The opening strokes of the String Quartet No. 5 in A major, Op. 18/5, for example, may have been more carefully treated with regard to their motivic significance in other major circulating versions of the
Beethoven quartets, but the slashing attack of the
Wihan starts the movement on a trajectory that never flags. In the engineering, too, the picture is one of imperfections that somehow turn out not to matter very much. Prague's Convent of St. Agnes was not an ideal location for chamber music (would
Beethoven have planned a performance in a convent?), and its overly live acoustics led to distortion in the loud passages at the top of the range. Give the producers credit, though; there is a notable absence of coughs from a Prague crowd in winter, and they weren't edited out, either, as there is one substantial thump from somewhere in the room. This, like the other releases in the
Wihan cycle, is well worth acquiring simply as a reminder of what drew many listeners to
Beethoven and to chamber music in the first place. Whatever its flaws, it has an urgency that is absolutely worth emulating.