Classical home listening - of love and death and snails

The Guardian 0

The Navarra String Quartet cover all bases, from Schubert to A Bullfighter’s Prayer. Plus, Nicholas Maw and a new opera with a cause

• The title Love and Death (Orchid Classics) could incorporate nearly all music ever written. The Navarra String Quartet, whose playing has a transparent, febrile energy, explain it as a stark expression of opposites: “the seductive courting of the matador before a final paso doble with the bull”. This British-based group’s new album combines three dark-themed glories of the repertoire: Schubert’s Death and the Maiden, D810; Janáček’s Quartet No 1, “Kreutzer Sonata”; and I Crisantemi, which Puccini wrote in haste after the death of a friend. Two tiny string pieces by György Kurtág and the elegiac The Bullfighter’s Prayer by the to me unfamiliar Spanish composer Joaquín Turina (1882-1949) complete the disc, recorded last year but dedicated to all who have suffered during the current pandemic.