Recently I attended perhaps one of the best concerts performed in Bagni di Lucca this year: the Elmire quartet, winner of the Adolfo Betti award, first violin of the legendary Flonzaley quartet and twin brother of the great chemist from which Massimo Betti’s family descends, gave us, at the casinò, impeccable and heartfelt performances of the forty-year-old Haydn’s Op 20 no 3, a piece of the pre-atonal Webern and the quartet op 18 no 3 by Haydn’s twenty-year-old student, Beethoven.

It was a truly memorable evening!

Here is the recording I made of the Elmire playing the first movement of Haydn’s string quartet Op 20. no 3 from the series known as the ‘sun quartets’ (from the sun shown on the title page of an early edition).

Op 20 are a milestone in the history of string quartet development. For the first time each instrument has a truly independent melodic line and there is a seriousness which goes against the more light-hearted ‘galant’ style of the times.

And here is the last movement of Beethoven’s string quartet op 18 no 3 which already shows the young composer’s complete mastery of the form he largely learnt from his teacher, Haydn.

Something about the quartet which inspired the Adolfo Betti award: the Flonzaley Quartet was organized in Manhattan, New York City in 1902 and was one of the first of a line of great quartets which would include, later in the century, such famous names as the Griller, Busch and Amadeus quartets.

The quartet, which took its name from its sponsor Edward de Coppet’s villa in Switzerland, had the following line-up:

• 1st violin: Adolfo Betti (Bagni di Lucca, 21 March 1875 – Lucca, 2 December 1950).
• 2nd violin: Alfred Pochon (Yverdon, 30 July 1878 – Lutry, 26 February 1959).
• viola: Ugo Ara (Venice, 1876 – Lausanne, 1 December 1936), until 1917; replaced by Louis Bailly (Valenciennes, 13 June 1882 – Cowansville, Québec, 21 November 1974), until 1924; by Félicien d’Archambeau (? – ?), until 1925; by Nicolas Moldavan (Kremenetz, 23 January 1891 – New York, 21 September 1974)
• violoncello: Iwan d’Archambeau (Herve, 1879 – Villefranche-sur-Mer, 29 December 1955).

(Adolfo Betti is first on the left)

The quartet, which had strict orders to devote themselves entirely to quartet playing without any outside commitments to orchestras, lasted until 1929. It made a number of recordings which are readily available on YouTube. I remember a conference given some years back, at Bagni di Lucca’s library in which Michele Bianchi, the noted Puccini scholar, gave a fascinating account of the Flonzaley’s playing technique. They played with extreme precision and empathy and did not indulge unduly in needless vibrati,  portamenti and glissandi so common at the time. The quartet’s approach appealed to composers like Stravinsky who wrote his three string quartet pieces and a concertino for them.

Here is the Flonzaley playing the fourth movement of Haydn’s ‘Lark’ quartet,  recorded around 1927.