Stenhammar Quartet - Wilhelm Stenhammar - String Quartets No. 3 & 4 (2013)

Announced as Volume 1, this BIS release launches a new cycle of Wilhelm Stenhammar’s works for string quartet, which are six in numbered ones, plus an unnumbered one in F Minor which comes chronologically between Nos. 3 and 4, but which the composer withdrew.

Wilhelm Stenhammar (1871–1927) is one of those very late Scandinavian Romantics—in this case, a Swede—who I’ve described before as setting with the midnight sun. A close contemporary of Carl Nielsen (1865–1931), Stenhammar has been overshadowed by the great Dane, and, as a result, I think, somewhat undervalued and neglected. Only 34 entries show up for Stenhammar in the Fanfare Archive—not one of them for his quartets—compared to 205 for Nielsen, enough for him to have made it onto the “Most Reviewed Composers” page.

But one can’t blame Fanfare for the absence of entries for Stenhammar’s string quartets, a situation due mainly to the fact that there aren’t very many recordings of them to be had. The Swedish label Caprice produced a cycle on three separate CDs that dates back to 1981. It doesn’t include the unnumbered F-Minor work, and it’s divided among three ensembles, the Fresk Quartet (Nos. 1 and 5), the Copenhagen String Quartet (Nos. 2, and 6), and the Gotland Quartet (Nos. 3 and 4). Those three discs sit on my shelf along with a much more recent 2007 two-disc set on CPO, in SACD no less, with the Oslo String Quartet, containing the quartets Nos. 3, 4, 5, and 6. But if the group ever recorded the Nos. 1 and 2, it’s a well-guarded secret. Except for two or three individual recordings of one or another of the quartets, coupled with works by other composers, as far as I know, that’s about the extent of Stenhammar’s string quartets on disc.