Luogo e data di registrazione		(dettagli in ogni scheda discografica)
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer / Engineer		Raymond McGill | Ben Wiseman at The Audio Archiving Company Limited
	Prima Edizione LP		-
	Prima Edizione CD		Decca | 478 8824 | 37 CDs | (c) 2015 | ADD
	Note		-

QUARTETTO ITALIANO Italy produced the first all-star string quartet - Pietro Nardini, Filippo Manfredi, Giuseppe Cambini and Luigi Boccherini - but by early last century, the country was in the invidious position of having some of the keenest quartet societies, but no home-grown ensemble capable of matching the visiting string quartets who graced their programmes: it was all part of the decline in orchestral and instrumental music brought on by the concentration on opera in the nineteenth century. Four young people who met at the Accademia Chigiana, Siena, in the summer of 1942 were determined to change things. Paolo Borciani (1922-1985), Elisa Pegreffi (born 1922), Lionello Forzanti (1913-2009) and Franco Rossi (1921-2006) spearheaded a movement which, by the 1950s, would take their nation into the forefront of chamber music. Brought together by the eminent cellist Arturo Bonucci, they got on so well, preparing Debussy's Op. 10 under his tutelage, that they swore to meet again when the war was over. So on 20 August 1945 they founded the Nuovo Quartetto Italiano - the "New" distinguished them from a previous ensemble and signalled their radical intentions. From the start they wanted to play all their repertoire from memory, as the Kolisch Quartet had done. Meeting in the Borciani family's Reggio Emilia apartment, they worked on their first programme: three pieces by Corelli, the Debussy and Stravinsky's Concertino for the first half, then Beethoven's First "Rasumovsky", with a Vinci gavotte as an encore. Their inaugural recital, in Carpi on 12 November 1945, was followed by one in Reggio Emilia, and in December they reached Milan, where a critc wrote: "One may, without any uncertainty, speak of an important revelation in the field of chamber music." By then they had added to their repertoire Haydn's Op. 76 no. 2 and op. 64 no. 6, Boccherini's Op. 6 nos. 1 and 3, Schumann's Second, Kodály's Second, Turina's La oración del torero, Beethoven's third "Rasumovsky" and Bartók's Sixth (soon dropped, although they later took up the First). In 1946 they added Mozart's Clarinet Quintet and "Dissonance" Quartet. In June 1946 they made their first 78rpm recording, the Debussy, for an Italian label, with the Vinci on Side 8. "Nello" Forzanti's personality came through strongly, yet within a year he left to pursue a conducting career (he later returned to the viola and in his nineties still played in a Californian orchestra). His successor was the tall, serious Piero Farulli (1920-2012), a  Florentine who had been hoping for this eventuality: with him they had to work up their small repertoire all over again. By autumn 1947 they were adding Giardini's Op. 23 no. 4, a piece by Dittersdorf, Villa-Lobos's new Ninth, Bloch's new Second, Glazunov's Fourth and Beethoven's Op. 130. In August 1947 they came to London, giving the forerunners of many recitals for the BBC's new Third Programme on the 17th, 20th and 25th, the latter a courageous tilt at Op. 130. "The first time they played the Op. 130, it was a direct broadcast, and they played it by heart", Borciani's brother Guido recalled. On 3 September they mae their debut Decca recording, at West Hampstead Studios: Haydn's E flat, op. 64 no. 6. It was rejected for release, but they returned for more broadcasts in October and again in March 1948, when They played for the Manchester Chamber Concerts Society as last-minute substitutes. This society asked them back regularly, and the BBC began presenting them in live invitation concerts at the Concert Hall of Broadcasting House, as well as in studio performances. The years 1948 and 1948 also saw them visit Austria, Spain, France, Germany, Holland and Scandinavia, gaining glowing reviews. "The Nuovo Quartetto Italiano made a sensational debut in Paris," Bernard Gavoty wrote in the Spectateur, "and for once the word is not too strong. I have never seen such simultaneity of attack, a like transparency of sound, a similar devotion to the common cause." On 11 November 1948 they reconvened at Decca Stusios: fron that session and another on 20 November came their first published Decca discs: the Haydn E flat and Boccherini's D major, op. 6 no. 1. Lovely as the Boccherini was, the Haydn E flat was one of those magical recordings which crop up only rarely. The two works were later coupled on an LP, and the Quartet's other Decca recordings went straight to LP. Especially noteworthy was the 1950 pairing of Schumann's F major, a gramophone premiere, and Verdi's E minor, which they never recorded (tired of being asked for it, they dropped it after 1960). These discs revealed an ensemble rather like the pre-war Franco-Belgian consorts - the Flonzaley or the Pro Arte - light-toned and mercurial, with deft, delicate bowing and subtle use of vibrato. There were hints that they were capable of a tonal beauty equalled in their own generation only by the Hollywood, Smetana and Borodin Quartets. They combined grace and lightness with a touch of portamento, but their charm and elegance had a deeper dimension - how daringly they plunged with Haydn into the darkness at the core of his Andante! In 1951, after many invitations, they toured the United States, "the country where we were playing the trump card of our future", as Farulli put it. In the New York Herald Tribune Virgil Thomson hailed "the finest string quartet, unquestionably, that our century has known. Perfection is the only word to describe this playing, perfection of a kind and degree that no quartet lover living, and no quartet player, has heard before." Symbolically they had dropped the "Nuovo" from their name - although it still appeared of their sensitive recording of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet, made in London in February 1952 - just after a BBC broadcast of it - with their usual collaborator, Swiss clarinettist Antoine de Bavier (1919-2004), a pupil of Luigi Amodio. It was the only Decca project played from the printed music. Notable among a series made at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Rome, were Schubert's A minor and B flat. The gentle humanity of their approach to the A minor was already apparent in this, the first of three recordings, while the B flat was a lyrical contrast to the vivacious Busch Quartet performance. In 1952 Elisa Pegreffi became Signora Borciani, but her husband fell ill, causing the cancellation of a seventyfour-concert US tour. Not until 30 January 1953, after five inactive months, could they resume recitals. The birth on 30 May of Mario Borciani, destined to be a pianist and composer, barely disrupted their schedule: within two weeks they recording in Milan for a different label. By now they were coming closer to an "Italian" sound, with suave sonorous bowing and chording. Their lustrous tone was achieved on quiete modest instruments - Borciani's violin was a Rocca. In the concert hall, as on record they exuded an indefinable yet palpable spiritual radiance in slow movements: the demeanour of Madama Pegreffi-Borciani was positively angelic. Borciani and Rossi were dominant in rehearsal, while the quiet, dignified Farulli mostly kept his opinions to himself. Pegreffi, voluble in private life, respected her colleagues too much to lay down the law except on repertoire - because of her they played no Mendelssohn or Tchaikovsky and just one work by Malipiero. "There was no pacifist in the Quartetto, but Faurulli and I were more ready to accept what the others said, because we knew we had two great musicians with us", she said. "We never joked - we quarrelled but we never joked!" Borciani was a born leader and Pegreffi the perfect second, achieving a miraculous match with her husband and managing to meet Farulli's darker tone at the other extreme. Rossi was "a poet", according to Antonín Kohout, his opposite number in the Smetana Quartet. Through the 1950s they worked out the implications of what they gleaned in just one long evening from Wilhelm Furtwängler. Meeting him at the 1951 Salzburg Festival, they ran through Brahms's F minor Quintet with the conductor at the piano and were bowled over by his approach. He changed their entire attitude: they strove to bring more rhythmic freedom to bear on their innate classicism. In 1956, needing to expand their range, they began to drop their policy of playing by heart. They taught individually, the violinists in Milan and Farulli and Rossi in Florence, but also gave corporate masterclasses at the Royal Academy of Stockholm and summer courses at the Vacanze Musicali in Venice. In August 1965, after making two LPs in Geneva for yet another label, theytravelled to Vevey to begin their fruitful association with Philips, taping Haydn, Schubert and their Mediterranean interpretations of Debussy and Ravel. The Quartetto Italiano which emerged in the mid-1960a had undergone a radical rethinking. "We took stock of ourselves in recent years", Borciani told Newsweek in 1977. "We started just after the war, in a Toscanini style, everything in its place. But the world changed - and luckily we grew up with the worls." The humanity remained, but they risked much broader tempi, executed with a more massive, muscular approach to chording and tone quality. The first signs of their last - and perhaps most rewarding - phase could be heard as early as 1967, when they recorded Beethoven's Op. 132. For the first time since the 1930s, here was a group willing and able to play the chorale sections of the "Heiliger Dankgesang" really slowly. In 1968-69 they completed the Late Quartets, and through the early 1970s they gradually added the rest of the Beethoven cycle. A Mozart cycle was just as monumental. As the label's house quartet, they were usually restricted to the central repertoire - their luminous 1970 Webern disc was a rare exception. In 1974 they began collaborating with Maurizio Pollini on the Brahms Piano Quintet - in the Quartetto's thirty-five-year history, only he and De Bavier were accepted as guests - and in 1977 came the final addition to their repertoire, Schubert's G major, which they taped that July, observing the huge first-movement exposition repeat. It stands as their most arresting interpretation, drawn on the grandest scale. They seemed to have reached a new plateau of excellence and were planning to record string quartets - Mozart with Dino Asciolla and Schubert with Pierre Fournier - when disaster struck. That December, Farulli had a heart attack and his colleagues made the mistake of replacing him temporarily with Asciolla. He was mortally offended and the breach never healed. So it was with Asciolla that they went to the Herkulessaal, Munich, in January 1979 to record the Brahms Quintet for DG with the imperious Pollini. A remake of Schubert's "Death and the Maiden" and Quartettsatz followed for Philips. Early in 1980, Asciolla abruptly quit, making comments to the press which did not square with what one knew of the Quartetto Italiano's working methods. By a sad coincidence on the evening of their last concert, 17 February, the now recovered Farulli was playing quintets with Amadeus Quartet. Paolo Borciani's illness and early death meant there could be no rinascimento of the Quartetto: but it had been an epic musical odyssey, and much of the evidence is contained in this box of compact discs. Tully Potter