Thus far in recorded history, there have been two releases of the seven string quartets by Bohuslav Martinu: the
Stamic Quartet's cycle recorded for Bayer in 1990 and this cycle by the
Panocha Quartet recorded for Supraphon in the late '70s and early '80s and re-released here by the same company in 2007. This dearth of recordings compares unfavorably with the more than a dozen recordings of
Shostakovich's quartets and the more than two dozen recordings of
Bartók's quartets, but it is unfortunately all-too-typical of Martinu's low-standing in the twentieth century musical pantheon. That this estimation is entirely incorrect is evident to those performers and listeners actually familiar with Martinu's music, music that, at its best, is intensely lyrical, radiantly colorful, and strongly propulsive yet also harmonically elusive and structurally evasive.
These qualities are all found in abundance in Martinu's masterful series of string quartets. The series starts with the ebulliently modernist post-First War First Quartet of 1918 and reaches a climax with the nervously driven pre-Second War Fifth Quartet of 1938, then comes back with the searingly expressive post-Second War Sixth Quartet of 1946 and then the serenely neo-classical Seventh Quartet, the "Concerto da camera," of 1947. And though Martinu lived until 1959, he wrote no further quartets, so unfortunately there are no late Martinu quartets. Fortunately, both recorded sets of Martinu's quartets are superb as well as superbly complementary. The
Panocha tends to stress melodies and lines, while the
Stamic favors tempo and forms, and in the end, one admires Martinu's poetry and lyricism with the
Panocha while with the
Stamic, it's his drama and control. Both recordings are likewise first class yet different: the stereo Supraphon is close, clean, and cool while the digital Bayer is sharp, focused, and vivid. Which, then, to hear? Why, both, of course.