Notos Quartett - Hungarian Treasures

The Guardian 80

Notos Quartett
(Sony/RCA)

Play the last four tracks to your music-nerd friends and ask them to name the composer. They’ll never get it. This all-Hungarian disc by the Berlin-based Notos Quartett ends with the 1898 Piano Quartet by Bartók – but a 17-year-old Bartók, sounding more Brahmsian than Brahms himself. The work was lost, and while it’s unclear whether this really is the first ever recording, it’s certainly the only one generally available. The Notos players give a fiery performance, hot-headed in the second movement, alternating richness with stillness in the third, and doing what they can with Bartók’s slightly heavy-handed finale. It’s paired with the Piano Quartet by Bartók’s friend Ernő Dohnányi, which they set about with passion, shaping its mammoth first movement into expansive phrases, and giving the whole thing plenty of Hungarian character. In between, Kodály’s Intermezzo for String Trio – a piquant, nonchalant little polka - is deliciously light on its feet.