The
Jubilee Quartet
(also known as the
Jubilee String Quartet
) is a young group with some years of top-notch training under its belt, and that shows here in the excellent technical work at many junctures. Hear the especially spooky, perfectly controlled opening of the first movement of the
String Quartet in G major, D. 887
,
Schubert
's swan song in the genre. One can truly feel
looking toward the eternal questions here. The early
String Quartet in E flat major, D. 87
, gets a superb reading here from start to finish; the quartet players catch the strangeness of this work, which
wrote when he was just 16, but that sounds like nothing else at the time, even
Beethoven
. Sample the second-movement Scherzo, with its two sections that seem to inhabit two different worlds. The news is a little less good in the
G major quartet
; the group's edgy, minimal-vibrato playing begins to wear over the 22-minute movement, and one has a desire for some lyricism. However, there are many beautifully executed moments along the way. This is plainly a young quartet to watch, and they are well recorded here at Potton Hall in Suffolk. ~ James Manheim