Cala Records

1995

{CD}

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The Oslo-based Cikada Quartet (founded in 1989) is new to current catalogues, and this programme -– commendably off-beat and diverse on paper – reveals some significant limitations. Overall, the players seem happier with the relatively free structures and more flamboyant effects of Crumb and Lutoslawski than with Webern's concentrated counterpoint ...
   ...
   The Wilanow Quartet offer other chamber works by Lutoslawski, the Varsovia quartets by Penderecki and Szymanowski, and to me either is preferable to the Cikada's choice of George Crumb's Black Angels. It's not that the players fail to do it justice (though well-regarded versions by the Kronos and Brodsky Quartets are already available) –- rather that the work itself, completed in 1970, seems increasingly thin and dated. The mixture of elementary sound effects and reminiscences –- Schubert, Bartok –- which once spoke eloquently of the composer's attitude to the Vietnam War, has too little purely musical substance to stand up well today, and this recording, simply by underlining the music's extreme diversities so vividly, leaves me dissatisfied and, in the end, impatient, despite the undoubted technical skills of the players.