With their performance of Schubert’s best known quartet, Death and the Maiden, the Kuss Quartet include two works written specially for them by composers whose music is still little known in the UK. Iris ter Schiphorst’s Sei Gutes Muts adds a recorder (Maurice Steger) to the four strings, and introduces whispered phrases from the text of the Schubert song that forms the basis of the second movement of his D minor quartet, to which the recorder player reacts as the strings pulse around him. Marc Andre’s Seven Pieces are miniatures, the longest of them barely 100 seconds long, each a concentrated study in a technique or a string texture.
Whether these three works make a convincing package is another matter. There is something rather brittle about the Kuss’s approach to the Schubert, which never quite captures the work’s extraordinary dramatic and lyrical range. In a quartet that is so familiar and which has been recorded by a century’s worth of great string ensembles, it needs something more than the addition of the two contemporary scores to make it stand out.
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