Dvorak at 150: A Date to Celebrate

This year’s Mozart Madness notwithstanding, the marketing of composers’ anniversaries has generally had a salutary effect, exposing underappreciated bodies of music and perhaps creating permanent listener awareness.

Handel, for instance, has never been as much in the public ear as he is today--six years after the tricentennial of his birth. Bartok is more frequently performed and better understood today than he was before the festivities attendant on his 100th birthday a decade ago.

Why Antonin Dvorak, born 150 years ago this month but not really getting the all-out treatment, has ever required popularization or reviving remains a mystery, considering the breadth, quality and accessibility of his output and, most important, his achievement in possibly creating more potentially memorable tunes than any other so-called classical composer.

His string quartets--Dvorak wrote 14 and is one of the form’s masters--in particular need more exposure, remaining as seldom heard in our concert halls this year as in any other.

An attractive survey of these works is appearing piecemeal on Germany’s small, highly selective Bayer label. The performers are the Prague-based Stamic Quartet, which makes its local debut at the Music Guild’s season opener next month. (The recordings use the German spelling, Stamitz , of the 18th-Century family of Bohemian musicians from which the ensemble takes its name.)

The playing here is notable for charm and sweetness of tone. There isn’t quite the rhythmic punch of the Panocha Quartet, which has recorded some of this music for the Supraphon label, but the Stamic’s lower-key approach brings out harmonic and textural subtleties that the Panocha occasionally misses.

Bayer couples the quartets as follows: The “American,” Opus 96, with the incredibly rich and underexposed work in G, Opus 106 (100141); two other masterpieces, in E-flat, Opus 51, and A-flat, Opus 105 (100142); earlier and more variable although by no means uninteresting creations, in D minor, Opus 34, where the Slavic style begins to assert itself, and the rather windy A minor, Opus 16, where it struggles, vainly, to break through the Brahmsian soundscape (100143), and the breathtakingly lyrical, superbly crafted Quartet in C, Opus 61, coupled with the familiar Waltzes, Opus 54 (100144).

Technical polish combines with interpretive sophistication and emotional engagement in the Quartet in E-flat, Opus 87, as played by the Los Angeles Piano Quartet in that ensemble’s overdue recording debut (MusicMasters 7064).

The quartet’s playing is rich in sound, secure in intonation, rhythmically intense yet ever responsive to the mood of the moment. Coupled as it is with an equally compelling reading of the Schumann Piano Quartet, the disc is required, indeed irresistible, listening.

This writer has not been alone in crusading for wider exposure of the glorious Sixth Symphony, Opus 60, and the efforts of its boosters have been paying off lately on recordings and, even more important, in live performances by American orchestras.

Two more recordings now join the ranks: a new release in which an uncharacteristically benign Christoph von Dohnanyi leads his Cleveland Orchestra in a reading of lyric ardor, rhythmic vitality and stunningly precise execution.

Its coupling (on London 430 204) is a grandly rhetorical, heroic performance of Janacek’s “Taras Bulba” from the same forces.

The other Opus 60 is the first CD appearance of the “legendary” 1938 recording by conductor Vaclav Talich (1883-1961) and the Czech Philharmonic (Koch Legacy 7060, mid-price).

Neither this performance nor its coupling, a dreary meander through Suk’s lovely String Serenade, justifies the conductor’s lofty reputation.

Talich’s view of the Symphony is relaxed to the point of stasis, most damagingly so in the gorgeous slow movement, whose enchanted moon resolutely refuses to rise. Furthermore, orchestral execution is sufficiently crude--imprecise string intonation, muffed woodwind entries--to obviate any argument supporting its “idiomatic” flavor.

The idiom is better served by a later, infinitely more accomplished incarnation of the Czech Philharmonic, circa 1962, under the vigorous, natty direction of Karel Ancerl in a program of Dvorak’s zesty concert overtures: “In Nature’s Realm,” “Carnival,” “Othello,” “My Home” and “The Hussites” (Supraphon 10605, mid-price).