Edinburgh Quartet

When I wrote about Leon McCawley's superb set of Hans Gál's piano music (11/05) I remarked that the four Gal string quartets were "in urgent need of rediscovery" - discovery more like, a journey happily facilitated by these excellent discs from the Edinburgh Quartet. Gál was an Austrian who escaped Hitler's Europe and fled to England and then Scotland in the late 1930s. His sophisticated but accessible musical language pushes the boundaries of formal design just about as far as they will go without fracturing, his slow movements poignant and tightly woven, his scherzi and finales invariably touched by understated humour.

Although stylistically distinctive, the First Quartet seems to take a good many of its cues from Brahms, Mendelssohn and, in the finale, Reger, a high-point being a slow movement that opens to ethereal harmonics and generates considerable intensity. Gál had a gift for eloquent melodic invention and the opening of the Second Quartet wafts in among weeping cadences, ligthening just a little for a wistful second idea. An underplayed strain of melancholy permeates the canzone, placed third in a novel five-movement structure, and where gently arpeggiated cello chords suggest parallels with Dvorák.

The Third Quartet ferries us forwards by 40 more years. The playful Scherzo and finale frame another of Gál's memorably meditative slow movements, this one opening to an unaccompanied violin solo before the other strings gather round in what sounds like a consolatory embrace.

Gál published the last in 1972 when he was in his early eighties (though he still had some 15 years left to him), the introductory Adagio perhaps the most magical episode in the whole cycle, music that twice recurs later in a movement that subsequently gives way to another of Gál's wry scherzi. Like its predecessors it betrays the hand of someone steeped in the classical quartet tradition while at the same time having something uniquely his own to say. A set of five pleasantly diverting Intermezzi predates the cycle, and the Improvisation, Variations & Finale on a Theme of Mozart take us on a light-hearted excursion via the kind of writing Gál put to more "serious" use for the masterly quartets. They provide the sort of music that seems to grow richer with each hearing, especially in such sympathetic performances. Roger Bevan Williams's detailed and absorbing booklet-notes make that process all the more pleasurable. Very strongly recommended.