#40: Fragility in bowing
Section 6: Antonin Dvořák – String Quartet Op.96, ii: Lento
Another aspect of this particular recording which we had difficulty in capturing was their distinctive tonal-emotional fragility. This presents some practical challenges and some methodological ones. Such sounds lie at the point where feeling meets the physicality of tone production: these ‘breaks’ cannot be executed intentionally, and certainly not self-consciously. They are often the most vocal, most emotionally intense utterances of all, and their indeterminacy is an intrinsic feature both of the means of its production, and of the effect. Indeed we found this movement the most difficult of the Czech Quartet’s recordings to connect with – and thus to copy. And while one could attempt to explain this in terms of its exhibiting more distant ‘stylistic features’, I suspect that it was the shocking sense of vulnerability, and the ways in which they fully embrace that space of contingency and liminality, that were more deeply responsible for our difficulty in empathising with their expressive manner, and to ‘feel as they were feeling’.
