Vainberg’s First Quartet, as recorded here, bears the odd opus number 2/141, and the date 1937-86. The explanation is that Vainberg wrote it as his first essay in the form, when he was 18 and seemingly impressed by both Berg and Schoenberg. The vicissitudes of his life (if one can use so light a term to cover his and his family’s sufferings at the hands of both Nazi and Communist anti-Semitism) caused the work to be lost; and in 1985 he wrote it down again from memory. An immensely gifted musician, he is said to have been possessed of a phenomenal memory, but it is difficult to suppose that some element of revision or recomposition all those years later was not involved.

At any rate, the outcome is an odd work, well written and individual in character. However, it lacks the distinctive nature of either the 10th Quartet of 1964 (the piece that made Shostakovich write that with only nine of his own composed, he was losing a race between them) or still more the 17th of 1987. That was his last, beating Shostakovich by two. It is a very interestingly written work, inserting a slow movement in the course of a sonata movement rather in the manner of the so-called Phantasy once suggested to English composers by W. W. Cobbett and successfully achieved by, especially, Frank Bridge. Vainberg can have known nothing of this, but he reaches a comparable solution to a formal problem, and does so with real invention and structural good judgement.

The Gothenburg Quartet have been making something of a speciality of Vainberg; they play these three pieces with liveliness and perception, and anyone curious about this remarkable sequence of works would find a good sampler here.

JW
(From: Gramophone, May 1998)