Heritage: The Music of Madrid in the Time of Goya Luigi Boccherini (1743–1805), Gaetano Brunetti (1744–1798), Manuel Canales (1747–1786), João Pedro de Almeida Mota (1744–c1817), Cristóbal de Morales (1500–1553) Cuarteto Quiroga Cobra 0067, 2019; one disc, 80 minutes

Abstract

Heritage: The Music of Madrid in the Time of Goya promises to contribute to a revisionist history that has been constructed through both scholarship and performance over at least the last twenty years. It nestles amongst writings and performances that expand our knowledge of chamber-music compositions celebrated during the late eighteenth century, illuminating their social significance and their status within an Enlightenment discourse that stretched between a new European intellectual cosmopolitanism and an increasingly expansionist nationalism. Cuarteto Quiroga present one string quartet by each of four composers active at Spanish courts between the mid-1770s and the early 1800s. Luigi Boccherini’s inclusion at the beginning of the disc allows for its immediate contextualization – his name being better known than those of Gaetano Brunetti (1744–1798), Manuel Canales (1747–1786) and João Pedro de Almeida Mota (1744–1817). The processes of recovering, editing, selecting and performing unknown works such as these usually stem from a solid collaboration between performer and researcher, here between the Cuarteto Quiroga and the musicologist Miguel Ángel Marín, as explained in the beautifully produced accompanying CD booklet. The group’s biography, as presented here, might have benefited from a little more focus on their expertise in eighteenth-century repertory and their credentials to perform on historically set-up instruments. Instead, the listener gets a long list of general stringquartet accolades that filled me, at least, with little hope for a gutsy performance that maximizes the unique qualities of both the differently tensioned strings and the pre-Tourte bow. The introduction to the group rather suggests that its members subscribe to a timeless ideal of the string quartet and its performance which much recent scholarship has tried to unpick. While pleasant to listen to, the performances of these works indeed fail to do full justice to the promise of historical revisionism: while the sleeve notes by Marín explicitly lament the loss of the Spanish ‘poetic sensibilities that were (in Boccherini and Brunetti) very personal’ and the prominence of ‘the Austro-Germanic world’ in our historical understanding of the string quartet, the performance style remains true to those ideals of beauty of tone and equilibrium of voices that were posthumously celebrated in the quartets of Haydn and Mozart – in the process of the Austro-German elevation of the genre – but that were arguably never central to either their performance or their composition. The quartets recorded here are nicely varied. To start with, the works by Boccherini and Brunetti follow the three-movement form more common in Italian works, while those by Canales and Almeida Mota each finish with a rousing fourth-movement finale, suggesting a Viennese influence. This may reflect the composers’ backgrounds: both Boccherini and Brunetti arrived in Spain young but with exposure to Italian training. Indeed, Brunetti’s work, the Quartet in B flat major L185,