At a terse sixteen minutes, Erwin Schulhoff’s 1924 String Quartet No. 1 is the shy, awkward younger cousin of the early 20th century quartet family. Lurking unnoticed at the end of the big kids’ table, it quietly absorbed and reformulated the edgy vernacular of its elders — the folk inflections of Janáček and Bartók, Stravinsky’s fizzy neoclassicism, the lushness of Debussy and Ravel, the craggy atonality of Schoenberg and Berg — with ruthless efficacy. A good performance of it should give you the willies, and none on record tops this 2015 reading by Amsterdam’s Ragazze Quartet, who key into its Interwar angst and foreboding finale with goosebump-inducing gusto.
Schulhoff entered the Prague Conservatory in 1904 at the recommendation of Antonin Dvořák. The Raggaze’s high-spirited performance of the latter’s Thirteenth String Quartet is by turns ebullient and wistful, a sorely needed pick-me-up that elegantly Febrezes away Schulhoff’s grim miasma.