Bold Whispers, Ironic Subtexts

Tim Riley reviews the Guarneri Quartet’s “Complete RCA Album Collection.”

By Tim RileyAugust 27, 2025

• Music

TODAY’S STRING QUARTET BUFFS enjoy too many choices—virtually the entirety of the recorded legacy on streaming, and a slew of young Turks (like the Danish String Quartet on ECM) pushing the form along. Complete Beethoven cycles from Cuarteto Casals, Quatuor Ébène, and Dover, Pacifica, Miró, and Takács quartets all vie for attention—and that’s just in the past five years. Yet since the Emerson Quartet’s retirement in 2023, fans have been deprived of an American group with the gravity and purpose that the Guarneri Quartet displayed between 1964 and 2009, 45 years with only a single personnel change.

Sony’s monumental 49-disc box set (compiling the remastered RCA releases) cements Guarneri’s status, spanning the Brahms Piano Quartets and Quintet with Arthur Rubinstein, the early Beethoven set (1967–70), the Bartók set from 1977, and a feast of left-field entries like Dohnányi, Verdi, Grieg, and Smetana. Only later, on the Philips label, did they approach Janacek, Webern, and Berg—work not included here. Across their sweeping career, the ensemble brought virtuoso skill to demanding yet thoughtful interpretations. To this, they added gripping emotional color, ironic subtexts, and bold whispers to familiar works, balancing accuracy with great risk and daring. Even as the early instrument movement gathered followers, and challenged a lot of old-school assumptions, the consensus that formed around the Guarneri felt less conservative than irrefutable.

Christened with concerts featuring Mendelssohn and Hindemith at the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont, in August 1964, the Guarneri’s founding members—violinists Arnold Steinhardt and John Dalley, violist Michael Tree, and cellist David Soyer—had each apprenticed with esteem across the professional world. Steinhardt left his post as assistant concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra to lead; Soyer had worked with Dalley in the American String Quartet, and with Tree in the Marlboro Trio (with Anton Kuerti).

Most quartets up until then considered the first violinist a de facto leader, the final arbiter of bowings and tempi. The Guarneri established a leaderless protocol, arguing with candor about tempi and color (as captured in rehearsal in Allan Miller’s 1989 documentary High Fidelity). In this democratic spirit, second violinist Dalley had the option of playing first chair in works with only one violin.

Pianist Rudolf Serkin and his father-in-law Adolf Busch, who led the Busch Quartet, founded the Marlboro summer retreat to promote the chamber music catalog, and mentored the Guarneri before it began concertizing. It came up through such auspicious patronage that success almost seemed preordained. But the Guarneri fought unlikely forces, including winning over broader audiences to both the form and its lesser-known pieces. For too long, Marlboro’s European émigrés found American audiences ignorant of this small-ensemble repertoire, confusing its size with a lack of depth. Brahms, especially, found the context an invigorating canvas for symphonic-level musical statements, especially in the three String Quartets, three Piano Quartets, a Piano Quintet, and two String Quintets (the Guarneri skip his two String Sextets and three Piano Trios). At music school, if you do not know the manic fevers of the final Beethoven Quartets (op. 127–135), you miss a key chunk of Beethoven’s greatness.

Sony’s discography and session notes by Tully Potter reveal a bold strategy. It took seven sessions at New York’s Webster Hall for the group to nail its double debut, with Smetana and Dvořák on the first disc and a Mozart pairing on the second. But 15 total sessions in 1965 yielded four 1966 releases alone, including Tchaikovsky’s Sextet (“Souvenir de Florence” with violist Boris Kroyt and Marlboro mentor cellist Mischa Schneider), the Brahms Piano Quintet (with Arthur Rubinstein), and an ambitious yet commanding Mozart pairing (his last two quartets, the “Prussians,” nos. 22 and 23). Only then did they dive into Beethoven.

At the time, Europeans in the Budapest and Hungarian quartets, as well as Americans in the Fine Arts and Hollywood String quartets, held sway, along with New York’s Juilliard String Quartet, led by Robert Mann, one of the few groups trained stateside. Launching a new quartet with such unlikely works amounted to a dare. First impressions included a bold feel for some ribald passages in the Smetana, with its tart ensemble challenges; on the second disc, however, Mozart’s last two quartets featured the same group as refined and deliberate. These first impressions proved distinctive, a fine blend of individual voices that merged with compelling ease.

You could never launch an ensemble with a Smetana quartet today. And alongside this peculiarity, the group sported a clear knack for Mozart, which George Bernard Shaw described as music that “makes the hardest things seem like child’s play.” Here’s how Steinhardt spoke of Mozart in his 1998 memoir Indivisible by Four: A String Quartet in Pursuit of Harmony: “The first movement […] is indeed good-natured and sunny, but it is certainly not simple. It is music with detail and imagination wrapped in innocent friendliness.”

These early Mozarts capture the suspense of the Guarneri players finding their voice. They match verve with poise, and find an elegance that never seems precious. Already this young ensemble has a distinctive sound and an assured manner with some of the repertoire’s most demanding material. Steinhardt’s leadership in the opening measures projects the gentlest control with a preternatural grace; you can even hear the others listening as they bow behind him, and they all trade phrases with mischief—their handoffs alone evince a sense of fun. When the violin’s solo lines merge with viola and cello, you already hear a generosity of spirit between voices. In many ways, these handoffs offer expressive possibilities simply by the way players match one another’s tone or phrasing—and, alternately, how they may shift focus or momentum toward something new. But the larger lines never blur: you always have a sense of a movement’s longer processes, the way Mozart presents a melody, fiddles with it, contrasts it with another, and then develops it into fields beyond its seeming capacity.

The larghetto slow movement to the B-flat Major, no. 22, teeters between sadness and comfort, and many of the duets sound like single voices split in two; focus gets sustained and then relieved at reliably solid intervals, and abruptly curtailed. When the players trade phrases, moving up by getting quieter and quieter, it’s almost like they all have hands on the same volume knob. (This early recording gained them an Edison Classique Award along with one of their 15 Grammy nominations.)

The group’s sound sparked immediate attention. Producer Max Wilcox invited another client, the 78-year-old pianist Arthur Rubinstein, to a listening session. Impressed, the legendary pianist enlisted them for a Brahms set that quickly assumed primacy—four Piano Quartets and the Quintet—as well as the Schumann and Dvořák Piano Quintets and a Fauré Piano Quartet (all recorded 1967–70). These sessions throw off continuous surprises. Rubinstein’s autumnal warmth offsets the Guarneri’s tensile strength. In early rehearsals, as Steinhardt recalled in Indivisible by Four, Rubinstein “seemed blithely unconcerned with wrong notes and the occasional uneven passage” but “was able to recover his poise and play so beautifully,” fostering a blend wherein grand gestures conversed with hushed secrets. Too bad these sessions didn’t include the three Piano Trios; in the great G Minor Quartet op. 25, with Dalley playing first violin, you hear a supporting player’s larger temperaments unleashed. (Collaborations became a distinctive feature, with second violist Pinchas Zukerman in the Brahms Quintets and pianist Emanuel Ax in the Schubert “Trout” Piano Quintet in 1983.)

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, as new groups like the Cleveland Quartet emerged (with a frisky Brahms recording), the Guarneri slowly built a reputation as reliable, determined, and sturdy, a worthy rival to the establishment’s Juilliard. When they started their Bartók cycle in 1974 (for release in 1977), they weaved in sessions for the Schubert Quintet in C Major with Leonard Rose. This final work from a dying master, renowned among string players but rarely programmed, is one of the few string quintets with two cellos (Roger Sessions wrote an answer of sorts with this instrumentation in 1957–58). Centering the Guarneri’s career, this recording still has an inimitable glow, an epic vision built from intimate exchanges. The Hollywood String Quartet’s seasoned 1951 recording of this work provides the stately precedent; the Guarneri seems to play against this classic Hollywood session, and takes things further.

A secondary theme emerges here: the group’s career runs on a parallel track with the Baroque instrument revolution (or the “period practice” movement). Early on, this meant many modern string players faced fierce arguments about “authenticity” from people who preferred the older bows and gut strings for Bach, Haydn, and Mozart. If we can refurbish instruments to approximate the lighter types these composers wrote for, wouldn’t that lead us to more faithful interpretations? Yes and no. A lot of music schools embraced the original instrument (or historical practice) movement while maintaining a core belief in all the modernizations that had developed across the 19th and 20th centuries. Orchestras had swelled with hall sizes, and bigger, louder gestures became the norm.

But the norms kept shifting in nonlinear fashion, like they do. All chamber musicians confronted classical music’s most compelling arguments of the 1970s and 1980s. It’s a measure of the Guarneri’s sympathies and taste that their recordings hold up against any Baroque practice titles. This Schubert Quintet session clinches the argument: if you want period instruments at a very high level, consider the Belgian Kuijken Quartet’s 2015 recording with Michel Boulanger or the Dutch cellist Anner Bylsma’s ensemble from 1991. Each of these brings the piece a lean resolve and an ease of phrasing that can make it seem both bigger and smaller—Schubert creates a world in such vivid detail that each bar seems to reflect the whole.

But the Guarneri-Rose recording from 1975 contains something more, even with its more conservative approach. The tone has both intimacy and vastness of scale, where quieter moments compete with louder passages for intensity. In the final two movements (Scherzo and Allegretto), a rambunctiousness bursts out, as if all the tenderness of the opening movement’s celestial second theme had set off earthy tremors. In the first movement especially, Schubert calls up the past and points the music toward a completely new home, the uncertain new world of 1828 just after Beethoven’s death. The piece still shames us for how we mistake melody for a lack of profundity, and confronts death with an imperfect serenity. Schubert, dying of a mysterious venereal disease (probably syphilis), felt a gathering Romantic storm and threaded its eye. You get the sense that the Guarneri players have opened their ears to the early instrument stylings without compromising any of the group’s vision or identity.

Their three Brahms and Schumann quartet entries still rival any other group’s, and in Soyer’s opening cello solos in the Dvořák Piano Quintet, the group lifts a secondary composer up toward greatness. These qualities all merge in the Schubert pieces, which count as a Guarneri specialty. Across all of this composer’s quartets that they recorded (nos. 12–15), the Schubert sound approaches an ideal, balancing muscle with delicacy, fortitude with tenderness. But the C Major Quintet stands out among even these. This late Schubert work feels defining, as if the group summoned its essence from music that rivaled even late Beethoven, and let the score define the group instead of the group’s will imposing itself on the material.

Yes, 49 discs feels overabundant. But what’s missing here is just as revealing. The Guarneri released only a few select Haydn works, in 1978 and 1980 (op.77/1–2; op. 20/4, op. 74/3), and then the final work, The Seven Last Words of Christ, op. 51, in 1987. Most view Haydn’s 68 string quartets as the foundation and anchor of the form, and a necessary starting point for most ensembles to learn that form’s contours. That a leading group has so little Haydn proves puzzling. The other blank spot is Shostakovich: his 15 quartets have just received a magisterial new set from the Cuarteto Casals, and most consider it the third leg of the collection stool that any group needs to master (alongside Beethoven and Bartók). Steinhardt’s memoir doesn’t help much: “If a work was to undergo the incessant glare of the concert stage, one had better like it a lot. The quartet [Shostakovich’s Third] was shelved.” This gave the Emerson String Quartet a big opening: that group’s Shostakovich cycle holds its own with the previous generation’s Borodin Quartet.

If you’re up to here with box sets and reissues crowding out younger groups, parse things more with an ear toward taste and resolve. Few groups these days make it to 29 years (with only a single personnel change), never mind exhibiting such refined taste and consistency across music from the 1780s to the present day. Box sets suit certain careers, and the Guarneri RCA catalog gathers up fine performances without a single misfire.

It would be simplistic to accuse the Guarneri of putting taste over chance, prizing beauty of tone over Shostakovich’s pugnacity. The group’s swerving around the Shostakovich set carries suspicious overtones, especially given their very fine later Philips (with Soyer’s replacement, Peter Wiley) recordings of Janacek, Webern, and Berg. These works demand a willingness to squawk and screech and turn desperate, even vulgar—qualities at odds with the Guarneri’s cultivated sound. Even their Bartók, full of bold certainties, lacks the Budapest Quartet’s feral moods or the Juilliard’s splintering tensions.

This can lead some to conclude that, while it mastered certain cornerstones, the Guarneri lacked breadth and the range required for greatness. The greater loss is to generations of listeners who will never know what the Guarneri Shostakovich might have sounded like: where that politically fraught music might have led them, and how it might have stretched their sound into realms they hadn’t yet explored. If we hear them reaching beyond themselves in Schubert’s Quintet, that only makes us want more. And dream about Schubert listening in.