Author: David Botibol

Heath Quartet 18th January 2015 – Review by Richard Amey, Worthing Herald

Coffee Concert at Brighton Dome / Corn Exchange, Sunday January 18 at 11am. Heath Quartet: Oliver Heath, Cerys Jones (violins), Gary Pomeroy (viola), Christopher Murray (cello). Wolf, Italian Serenade; Bartok, String Quartet No 1 Opus 7; Beethoven, String Quartet No 14 in C# minor Opus 131.

They being among the youngest people in the Corn Exchange whenever they return to give these Coffee Concerts, Heath Quartet are logically recognisable as though the sons and daughter of this remarkable audience. In the years since their Brighton Dome residency, the Heaths have made several contributions to this richly maturing series of chamber music concerts, each distinguishable by the inclusion of a strong 20th century string quartet.

The previous two have been by Britten and Tippett and both left the listeners hugely enlightened and impressed by music many had not heard before. Now the Heaths came with Bartok, who, though mainstream 20th Century in this repertoire, constitutes a risk and is rarely chosen for performance at the Coffee Concerts.

So lovingly are the Heath now anticipated here that hearts and ears were open to hearing Bartok No 1 in complete confidence. Not only testament to that affection and admiration, but in tribute to the quality of this audience, which must be among the best of its kind in the country, Heath gave a programme that would not have drawn in many other public places the 200-plus who filled most of the seats.

Opening the morning as an apparently cheery greeting and opening to an essentially serious programme, even the humour amid the dynamically extrovert Italian Serenade by songsmith Hugo Wolf was shadily ironical and even sarcastic. But the delivery by Heath was palpably complete in its integrity and the flow into the Bartok was no sudden jerk or scare.

Always of such experienced and entertaining assistance are the Coffee Concert programme notes which I now hereby brand as ‘Chris Darwin’s Origins of the Pieces’. We often hear of great works composed for performers who then shun it on musical grounds. Usually, the composer got on with finding someone else to give the premiere. But here was a different story.

Darwin tells us that Bartok had a violin concerto ready for the love of his life to play. Girl ‘dumped’ boy. Boy (27), devastated, instead poured his feelings into the first of a series of string quartets out of Hungary that prickled the world of that genre. The unlyrical prickling still goes on but this intently-listening, committed, indeed relishing audience had no problems.

Bartok’s self-confessed opening funeral dirge found the Heaths conveying raw, agonised longing and regret, culminating audibly in a wringing out of the final drops of pain. Then came a forward-running momentum which, though seemingly back to life and reality, had the Heaths raging as though in grim reluctance to rejoin the race. The finale, like a dance with gritted teeth, containing possibly a softening smile proposed by the viola, ultimately in vain, had jaggedness and cragginess the Heaths superbly delivered.

While some of us go to the gym, pump iron, ride bikes or run a distance. Instead, the Heaths sometimes play music like this. Sunday morning or not, it was all action for them, with the cello bass felt through the floor and up the listeners’ feet, and even Oliver Heath drawn into the physical battle. He usually sits very still with mainly static feet and lets his lead fiddle do all the talking and responding to the score.

Violist Gary Pomeroy is similarly still, trunk down, but watch for his frequent smiles and turns of dark eyes to the others, enquiring or warmly confirmatory by turns. Like Oliver Heath, he had to break some sweat in this one. There’s nothing like violins to see musicians physically animated from top to toe. Second violin Cerys Jones’ face reveals the most of the four and she and cellist Christopher Murray get through the most physical work.

The reward, and a testing one still, was to play and to hear Beethoven’s Opus 131. In chamber music, this is among his late quartets and the second of his final three. These quartets take music beyond our existence. And remember the number 131 because Beethoven, the best qualified to say so, his judgment based on its extra imaginative content, rated it his best. Many would say that this verdict automatically places it above all others ever written.

There are seven movements for the price of four and a bonus extra scherzo. And it’s a free ticket into the unknown. Beethoven was deeply unwell, long stone-deaf, and tormented by a recalcitrant, feckless nephew forced into his care. But the music just kept coming.

And today, the Heath just keep coming, too, better, and better still. There was no encore necessary to programme, nor one to be justifiably demanded by an audience once again left in wonder at the quality of performance at these Coffee Concerts, which are heard in ideal in-the-round format. Who needs celebrated quartets at The (conventionally laid-out) Wigmore Hall when this more intimate and satisfying experience lies on your doorstep?

Richard Amey

Heath Quartet 18th January 2015 – Review by Andrew Polmear

This programme was not one for the faint-hearted: Bartok String Quartet No.1 followed by Beethoven opus 131 and preceded by Wolf’s Italian Serenade – the light-weight piece that is anything but light-weight. Our reward was a concert of sublime musicality, so uplifting that many in the audience hung around afterwards, reluctant to leave the building.

Unpicking what it was that made this happen isn’t hard. The Beethoven and the Bartok are great works, although the Wolf is a tricky, skittish piece that showed off the quartet’s skill without making me want to hear it again. Then there’s the quality of the players. What can I say about the Heath that hasn’t been said before? Their ensemble is impeccable, their playing expressive, ranging from the most delicate pianissimo to the most passionate fortissimo. They don’t seem to play a phrase that hasn’t been thought through. Although they are four very different players, they play with a single voice.

I think there were two other things at play this morning. One is that this audience and the Heath know each other well. They’ve been associated with Brighton Dome for at least seven years and played at the Old Market before that. We know not only how good they are but something of their peculiarities. Oliver Heath leads not by playing loudly – indeed sometimes he seems the softest player of the four – but by his intensity. Cerys Jones on second violin has a particularly mellow tone but also an ability to make her instrument scream with passion when she lets rip on a loud solo, as she did in the second movement of the Bartok. Gary Pomeroy is a delight to watch; he says he doesn’t know he’s smiling but that’s what it looks like. And Christopher Murray on cello has a pizzicato of which a percussionist would be proud – when it’s loud it’s like a pistol shot.

The second thing is playing in the round. The Heath like it. They say it feels as though the audience is there with them; they can play as they do when rehearsing without having to think about projecting to the back of the hall. And the audience likes it. It’s the difference between being on the bank watching a river going over rapids and being in a canoe going over those rapids yourself. You feel the danger and the exhilaration.

Having made those two points, I come back to the essence of the morning: this was a superb performance of two great works. The Heath are working on performing the complete Bartok cycle: that will be worth crossing the country to hear.

Apollon Musagète Quartet 14th December 2014 – Review by Andrew Polmear

Coffee Concert 14 December 2014 Apollon Musagète Quartet

Last year I wrote about the Apollon Musagète Quartet in glowing terms. Ever since then I have asked myself why I got so carried away, how could I have put them above other wonderful string quartets around, including Brighton’s own, much loved, Heath Quartet. Two bars into the Dvorak C major Quartet opus 61 and I remembered exactly what it was that made them so special. They play with an exquisite delicacy but also an intensity that is quite extraordinary. I have never thought those opening bars were anything special; but they played them with such expressive phrasing, such understated passion, that those bars will never be the same again.

And so it was throughout the quartet. Impeccable ensemble, perfect balance, a shared understanding of the music, turned what I have always thought of as one of Dvorak’s lesser works, into music that was thrilling from start to finish. There’s nothing showy about the way they play: tempi were modest, dynamics were not extreme. It’s that there was a purpose about every note, a deeply serious purpose that turned every phrase into something glorious. To pick out just two examples: in the first movement there is a little bridge between two passages where the first violin plays a rising scale and the others come in when he reaches the top. Pawel Zalejski started his run quietly and got quieter as he went up, slowing the last few, barely audible, notes like a stream that seems to hesitate on the brink before crashing over into the waterfall. Magic. In the second movement there’s a point when Dvorak abandons melody and has his players moving from one key to another, low down, quiet, as though groping through the darkness, before Piotr Szumiel on viola went up on tiptoe and hauled them back out of the pit with an achingly played melody.

The pieces played in the second half were unknown to most of the audience: the first quartets of Szymanowski and Gorecki. The Szymanowski is a complex, deeply felt piece from 1917, not unlike early Shoenberg, that I want to get to know better. The Gorecki is another repetitive piece with plenty of his “head-banging” style that I would happily never hear again. The audience, me included, were completely carried along by both, such was the conviction and lucidity of the playing. We even loved the encore by Schulhoff, and his work doesn’t usually get cheered in London, let alone Brighton and Hove. Why did this second half go down so well? We were, of course, putty in their hands after the Dvorak. And they played these more recent works with irresistible passion. But also it is a tribute to the Coffee Concert audience, who have, over the 15 or so years of their existence (counting the glorious days at the Old Market) come to be able to tell the excellent from the merely good, and come to open their minds to new experiences in music.