Artea Quartet - Schubert D887

The Guardian 60

Champs Hill

The Artea’s second disc for Champs Hill is devoted to one of the challenging works in the quartet repertory. Schubert’s vast G-major work ranks alongside Beethoven’s late quartets as one of the supreme achievements in the repertory, and it’s certainly a bold choice for the Artea, one which by and large they justify quite convincingly.

It’s not a performance, though, that plumbs the depths of this searching, sometimes forbidding work as profoundly as it might. In the 20-minute first movement, especially, there seems more concern with shaping individual phrases winsomely than with exerting a real grip on the whole arcing structure, and in the later movements extremes seem to be avoided, whether in the angry outbursts of the Andante, or in the relentlessly driving finale. It’s all very accomplished, but perhaps just a bit too safe expressively, and the performance comes with a five-and-a-half-page sleeve note that manages to say absolutely nothing at all about the work on the disc.