This fine string quartet is exciting and moving in its own right. Fans of Szymanowski may find it particularly illuminating because it is a significant work of a period during which the composer was making a drastic transition of his style.

Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937) was Poland's greatest and most distinctive composer since Chopin. The earlier half of his career saw him adopt the hot-blooded, erotic romanticism of Scriabin and take an interest in music of the Near East. However, by the time World War I ended, he had shifted to a much less lush, harmonically harder-edged, yet more tonal, musical language.

Philosophically, Szymanowski during the same period lost his interest in the ego-driven Romanticism of Wagner, Richard Strauss, and Nietzsche. And personally his life changed drastically, as well: Polish independence and Communist seizure of his family property in the Ukraine required him, for the first time, to make his entire living as a musician, composer, and teacher.

The quartet is in three movements and totals a bit less than 20 minutes. Szymanowski had intended a four-movement work ending with a fully fugal final movement, but he dropped the final movement and moved the scherzo (which does have a fugato section) from second to final position.

The first and longest movement—nearly half the length of the quartet as published—is in a typical sonata-allegro form with a slow introduction. Its main expression markings are Lento assai; Allegro moderato. The opening slow section is close to the exotic, perfumed style of Szymanowski's earlier music; its melody has modal elements. The fast main body of the movement is Scriabinesque in its chromaticism, in the passionate nature of its main themes, and in the way the composer works them out. Despite the depth and passion of the music, the actual writing for quartet is entirely appropriate to the chamber ensemble: the music retains the clarity, transparency, and conversational nature of the greatest quartets.

The second movement, Andantino semplice, in modo d'una canzone, is, for a considerable stretch, in the form of a lyric melody for the first violin, with the remaining instruments forming a trio to accompany it. The last half of the expression marking means "in the style of a song," and that is an apt description of the movement up until the contrasting central section, which is sweet and mysterious at the same time. The return of the main melody does not dispel this new emotional quality, which is not resolved as the opening of the concluding movement intrudes.

This movement, Scherzando alla burlesca: vivace non troppo, begins with a quiet unison passage, then another unison—loud this time—that throws the movement into fast motion. There is a fugal passage, but this is interrupted by a sardonic waltz whose surface banality anticipates similar moments in Shostakovich's music. The music ends quietly, and perhaps just a bit anticlimactically, as the opening part of the quartet seems to set up a need for the larger-scale finale Szymanowski originally intended.

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