Sunday Gramophone - Ravel: Quartet in F - The Krettly Quartet recorded on March 22, 1929
By Gordonskene Sunday Nov 29, 2009 3:15pm
(Maurice Ravel - if you're only going to write one string quartet, make it immortal)
Heading over to more familiar music this week. The String Quartet in F by Maurice Ravel in one of the first recordings of the work (I think the first electrical recording was by the Capet Quartet), by the Krettly Quartet of Paris. Recorded for the French division of His Master's Voice in Paris on March 22, 1929.
Over the years this work has been recorded hundreds of times by a whole range of outfits, and certainly people who are familiar with it have their preferences. But it's always nice to be reminded of when a work was relatively new and its first performance was not that far in the past. And even though the Quartet in F first came about in 1903, "new music" took its time to get public acceptance going and no doubt a lot of people heard this recording for the first time when it was issued in 1929, some 26 years later.
We think of 26 years now as an eternity - but things moved a lot slower when the Ravel Quartet in F was new.
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I have scores and parts to both the Ravel quartet and the Debussy quartet. The structures and themes are very similar between the two.
Some people say one is an image of the other.
Who owes what to whom I have yet to understand to my own satisfaction, however the Debussy was written ten years earlier.
Thanks for posting this. I love this piece. And his piano concerto. And many of his others. And his orchestrations. Ravel seems to be forgotten by many, or at least not known other than for Bolero, which, as many times I've heard that over the century, I still like that too!
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