BEETHOVEN String Quartets: No. 13; No. 14; No. 16. Grosse Fuge • Auryn Qrt • TACET D130 (DVD-A: 239:10)

You owe it to yourself to hear the Auryn Quartet perform the late Beethoven quartets. True, the group’s approach is not to every taste. The disc at hand is a remake of a release James H. North reviewed more than 10 years ago, in Fanfare 23:1, but unless his aesthetics have changed, I suspect he would still find this new version to be “a fussy, overinterpreted performance. The players repeatedly lunge at phrases, which very quickly becomes an annoying mannerism. Tempos are hauled about, especially in the Grosse Fuge .” But what North hears as fussiness, others (like me) hear as a keen attention to detail that brings freshness and drama to every phrase, but without causing the architecture of a movement to crumble. As Mortimer H. Frank wrote of the conventional two-channel release of this new version in 31:5, “In every way these are distinguished readings. … [The Auryn Quartet’s Beethoven cycle] should be a traversal that will hold its own with the best.” I believe this is one of the most involved and engaging traversals of Beethoven’s late quartets in recent memory. You may not agree, but you really should hear it and make up your own mind.

Whether you should hear it via this DVD-Audio release, though, is a much more complicated question.

The four-hour running time of this disc does not mean that this is the slowest-ever performance of Beethoven’s late quartets. Actually, almost all the music (except for the second finale of op. 130) is presented twice, in completely different audio mixes. The first sequence is less controversial, although it is bound to annoy some listeners. The instruments are separated, one per speaker, with the violins coming individually from the front left and front right, the viola from the rear left, and the cello from the rear right. (If you want to appreciate this, you need something better in back than the cheesey little “effects” speakers so many of us started with when setting up for surround-sound movies.) Obviously, this does not reflect any configuration you will hear in real life, and that is enough to disqualify it for those who insist on a realistic concert-hall presentation. Such a sonic distribution may not serve concert reality, but I find that it does serve the score itself quite well; the individual instrumental strands are absolutely clear. It must be said, at any rate, that the strings’ sound is produced with the superb fidelity one would expect from this high-resolution format.

Then there’s the second track sequence. Once we’ve gotten through the quartets in the four-channel distribution I’ve just described, a second mix begins, an example of Tacet’s “Moving Real Surround Sound.” Well, the sound really moves, but that’s the only way it could be called “real.” In the first movement of op. 131, for example, as each instrument enters from the front left, it begins a slow outward spiral around the listener; the spiral reverses about midway through. Sometimes the sound bounces around according to a scheme involving high frequencies and low, or semitones and larger intervals. It isn’t just instrumental position that’s manipulated; the actual timbre is sometimes toyed with. The beginning of the Presto of op. 131, which is already taken at a fast clip, is re-equalized so that the instruments sound a little scratchy, the result reminding one of an LP being played at 45 instead of the proper lower speed; the central section of the movement, in contrast, bathes the cello and viola in reverb. The fourth movement of op. 135 is so grossly manipulated that it sounds like one of synthesizer wizard Isao Tomita’s lost master tapes. The “Moving Real Surround Tracks,” I suspect, would be most effective in conjunction with recreational pharmaceuticals.

Still, I do think the one-instrument-per-speaker mix is valid, and there the sound quality and performance quality are exceptional. For that reason, this single disc is worth consideration if you’re set up for DVD-A. Otherwise, at least investigate the standard two-channel release, which bears the same catalog number, minus the initial D. James Reel