Author: SA Office

The Brighton Dome Corn Exchange, 10 November 2013

I wasn’t sure about today’s concert. Solo baroque violin is a long way from our core repertoire of string quartets, and some of the advertised composers are a long way from being household names: Pisendel, Roman, Matteis, Biber. But I was encouraged  that it was given by Rachel Podger, who is known as one of the world’s foremost baroque violinists. And the fact that the concert was sold out suggests that others knew something I didn’t know.

Rachel entered dressed like an angel, from her mass of golden hair to her golden sandals: a reference to her CD called Guardian Angel from which today’s pieces were taken. She started with the sonata by Johann Georg Pisendel written about 1716: a minor work that she brought to life with her extraordinary playing. It helps that she has a lovely warm tone, that her considerable technique seems effortless, that she can convey a range of emotions from a gentle caress to a furious onslaught. But at the heart of her magic is her phrasing.

In her masterclass at Brighton College the day before, she talked about baroque phrasing: that you ease into a note, allow it to swell to its full volume, and then subside. It’s a phrasing made easier by the use of the baroque bow which is lighter than a modern bow, especially towards the tip, and wound to a lower tension. It’s also suited to gut strings, which often growl if attacked in a more modern way of playing. She also spoke about how the same shape applies to a phrase – whether just two notes together or a longer phrase. Today, in her playing, she demonstrated this: every phrase was exquisitely shaped as was every note within that phrase. You knew immediately what each note was doing there and where that phrase was going. What I have called a minor work became enthralling music in her hands. What part of a performer do you watch most? With Rachel it was the grace and precision of her bowing arm and the fluidity of her wrist that I found compelling.

I had my favourites among the lesser known works: three movements by Nicola Matteis, the man who walked from Italy across the Alps with his violin under his coat, to reach the court of Charles II in England and who taught the English violinists to rest their instruments on their chests instead of on their laps. And above all, the Passacaglia by Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber – a repeated 4 note descending scale on which Biber embroiders the most wonderful extravaganzas. The violinist is playing two parts: the 4 note scale and the extravaganza above (and occasionally below) it. Despite the pyrotechnics involved Rachel was always able to bring out that scale. It helped that she had explained the structure of the piece in advance. And while on the subject of her explanations, she was a delight to listen to: bubbling with enthusiasm, hugely informative, totally understandable.

What would I do if I were to plan next year’s concerts? I must confess that, with string quartets or closely related forms, I enjoy the intensity of communication between players, the huge repertoire of great works, the variety of closely-related sounds that a group of string players can make. Against that I have to say that a solo player gives the audience a chance to appreciate one person’s unique approach to music, which has not been modified to blend into a group. In responses to last year’s Strings Attached questionnaire several people said they did not favour concerts featuring voice “unless it was Mark Padmore” following his performance with the Britten Sinfonia. I feel the same about solo violin: “unless it is Rachel Podger”.

Andrew Polmear

The Brighton Dome Corn Exchange, 13 October 2013

Sunday morning in October, steady rain and about 300 people in the Corn Exchange for the first coffee concert of the series. Something serious must be going on. The first sight of the Corn Exchange was a disappointment; we were in the raked seating because the Corn Exchange was set up for the Comedy Festival and could not accommodate seating us in the round. But after that everything got better, even before the players came on. There were no chairs, just a stool on a platform for the cellist. And the players had provided their own stands, with elegant side extensions so that three or four sheets could be displayed at the same time. The stands were arranged in a straight row instead of the usual semicircle, so that the players faced straight into the audience. Then they came on. Everything about them confirmed their seriousness. Identical black suits, except that the cellist wore a waistcoat; identical cufflinks; the same shine on the patent leather shoes; just a hint of individuality in the hairstyles: both lower string players had long hair, held in place by different types of Alice band. They stood still until they had complete silence; then readied their instruments, again holding their positions for several seconds, before moving into the warmest, most sensitive rendering of those opening 18 bars of Mendelssohn’s opus 13 I have ever heard. All the attention given to their presentation now made sense as they showed the same seriousness in their playing. Their precision was extraordinary, their range of expression huge, without ever being showy. Some people still think of Mendelssohn as lightweight. This was the performance to put such nonsense completely to rest.

There is a lot more to say about their playing: their instruments blended perfectly together, their tempi seemed just right. At the bottom of it all was something the leader said afterwards: that they approach the piece with the aim of finding the essence in every bar. And that is how it felt. One example came in the second movement. After some particularly expressive writing Mendelssohn introduces a fugue which starts in the viola before being taken up by the other three players. To bring out the point that something different was happening they played the fugue without vibrato. It was like a blow to the stomach.

The other three pieces were Russian, starting with Prokofiev’s Visions Fugitives. Prokofiev wrote 20 of these little pieces, each one based on the personality of a friend, as Elgar did in the Enigma Variations. It seems that Prokofiev had a lot more friends than Elgar and they were certainly more fun. More seriously, the contrast showed the extraordinary development in music over the 16 years between the two works. Incidentally, if you are still puzzling over the huge mutes the players used in the Prokofiev, they are practice mutes designed to give a much quieter sound than an performance mute, so as not to disturb the neighbours. The sound wasn’t just quieter, it was thrillingly different.

Stravinsky’s short Concertino was, at first hearing, an exciting work that starts with an almost jazz-like syncopation and moves through a variety of moods in just six minutes. But then came the Shostakovich fourth quartet; a work of searing melancholy mingled with humour and even gaiety, played with such understated feeling that at the end the audience behaved as though stunned. Had they ended with a showy piece we would have stood and cheered. But this was better, and they were right to decide against an encore.

Did the daring programming work? Absolutely. No-one in the audience had come along for an easy romp through the old favourites; and this quartet could have played Berio and we would have been with them.

Chris Darwin, who wrote the review of the Jubilee Quartet concert, wrote about the dead acoustic at this end of the Corn Exchange, where all four sides are curtained. For me in the front row there was no problem at all, but those further back confirmed that the lack of resonance was a problem, as did the players. They overcame it by playing more fully, and making notes longer than they would in a more resonant hall. I gather we’ll be back in the round in the centre of the hall for the next concert. There will be no problem with lack of resonance there.

Finally, speaking of Chris Darwin, it’s always a relief to find that he is writing the programme notes for another season. It’s like the relief one has, after being abroad for some time, coming back to find that George Alagiah is still reading the BBC news.

Andrew Polmear

The Brighton Dome Corn Exchange, 3 October 2013

I have heard tell that Günter Pichler, leader of the Alban Berg quartet, used to practise in high temperature and humidity wearing a fur coat, so as to be prepared for extreme conditions during a performance.  But one of the conditions that dedicated practice can do little to compensate for is the acoustics of the venue.  Thanks to the ongoing Comedy Festival, the Jubilee Quartet had to perform last night  in the northern half of the Corn Exchange.  Its acoustic, thanks to acres of plush curtain and a splendidly full audience in its cramped raked seating, was dry – well, actually, dead.  The obvious consequence of such a dead acoustic for the audience is that the balance is capricious.  We, back right, heard little of the viola and cello; a friend, front left heard too little of the violins.  More worryingly, a dry acoustic is unnerving for the players who can hear their own instrument but not much else, encouraging a cautious approach to playing, rather than the bolder approach that would help build up the sound.

At the launch concert for the new Strings Attached Coffee Concert Series at the Dome, the young Jubilee Quartet coped magnificently with these difficulties.  For me, the highlight of the evening was Janacek’s ‘Intimate Letters’ quartet, a characteristically episodic piece where much of the interest is in the local detail of each episode – something which the dry acoustic actually helped one to hear. The quartet captured convincingly the passionate torment behind the music, and special mention should go to Amy Tress, who gave a confidently lyrical performance of a notoriously difficult second violin part in this her first concert with the Jubilee Quartet.  There was also fine playing from the quartet in the other two items.  In the slow movement of Haydn’s Op 54 no 2 quartet there was a wonderfully wayward riff from the leader Tereza Privratska, and glorious cello arpeggios from Lauren Steel in the last movement.  The impact of Schubert’s incomparable “Death and the Maiden” quartet was weakened for me by the impossibility of building up a full body of sound in the dry acoustic, despite passionate and dedicated playing by this talented young group.

Mary McKean, chair of Strings Attached, assured the audience that future concerts, after October, in the main Coffee Concert Series will be in the southern half of the Corn Exchange.  Both audience and players will be relieved at that and we look forward to a wonderful season.

Chris Darwin   4 October 2013

 This quartet’s name was new to me, despite the prizes and acclaim detailed in the concert programme. And on 13th March 2013 here they were, starting their programme with Beethoven’s last, great, quartet, which most performers would have reserved for the end. In fact they formed 10 years ago; I have just not been paying attention. From the moment they entered the hall I knew it was my loss. They have the assurance of people who know exactly what they are doing. From the first they played with a rich warm tone, which is not easy to achieve in the demanding acoustic of the Corn Exchange. All four players contribute to this very distinctive sound. Their phrasing is exquisite, their timing (after a few early Sunday morning moments) impeccable. Even the varnish on their instruments glowed with the same rich brown.

 

In fact, at first I thought they were playing the first movement of the Beethoven too smoothly, not capturing the hesitancy, the startling changes of direction that Beethoven has written into the piece. The second movement too, very fast, almost slick, made me think of happy galloping horses, rather than the deaf genius pounding the table, berating God. It was the third movement that totally undid me: very slow, very still, impossible to capture in words and writers find themselves writing phrases like “touching the infinite” then crossing it out but failing to come up with anything else. The fast last movement was tremendous: however fast the tempo, however wild the writing, the players never lost their tone quality, their accuracy, their perfect communication from one player to another. Incidentally, I’d always thought of the last movement as Beethoven questioning whether he must die, since he wrote on the score “Must it be? It must be!” Chris Darwin’s programme notes disabused me – it was based on Beethoven’s regular argument with his landlady about whether he had to pay the rent!

 

OK, I thought, with that warm tone and lyricism they’ll be perfect for Ravel. Here my surprise was the other way round. The lyricism was there all right but they brought out the turbulence of the piece in a way I have never heard before. Often Ravel writes a fast and almost grumbling figure against the main ‘tune’. Most quartets play these ‘grumbling’ figures as though they are background. The Modigliani did it the other way round. As a result I heard complexities I’d never heard before.

 

Some practical things: about light and about positioning. This Sunday the blinds were drawn over the three south windows. Having praised the decision in the past to let the light shine through, I’ve changed my mind. We weren’t screwing our eyes up against the sun, and the lighting in the darker Corn Exchange was more interesting. As for the positioning of the quartet, whatever happened to playing in-the-round? The audience are in the round but this quartet, and the last, faced resolutely north. If this goes on, only late-comers will sit on the south side and that would be a shame.

 

Andrew Polmear

 

 

It must be every concert manager’s nightmare: with tickets for the 17th February already sold for the Calefax Reed Quintet, they cancel. But rarely can an audience have been rewarded with a substitution of such quality. The Bennewitz Quartet is world-renowned, and gave a concert that had some seasoned audience members saying it was the best concert ever.

Mozart, Dvorak, and Smetana; all three from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, although the cultural gap between 18^th century Vienna and 19^th century Bohemia is huge.

Mozart’s ‘The Hunt’ is a work of the Age of Enlightenment. The Bennewitz chose to bring out the dramatic features of the piece: the contrasting loud and soft passages, the changes of mood. This was fine: those contrasts are there in the piece and their interpretation never went beyond what Mozart wrote. My only reservation is that their full-blooded approach lost the exquisite elegance that is also there in the writing. But there is room for different interpretations; theirs was committed, totally convincing and I loved it.

The Dvorak was a selection from ‘Cypresses’, originally written for voice and piano and rewritten for string quartet much later in his life. For me this was when the concert moved on to a different plane. They played the six short pieces, five of them full of longing and regret, one cheekily cheerful, with a flowing ease, with the nostalgic passion of a man looking back on a love affair now past, which he was. Stepan Jezek, the second violinist, who spoke wonderfully before each piece, commented that they loved these pieces partly because Dvorak treats each instrument as an equal, and weaves the four parts into an ever changing whole. You can’t say that about some of his quartets; thank goodness he waited 22 years before reworking these pieces.

I would say more about the Dvorak if it were not for the impact that the Smetana Quartet ‘From My Life’ had on me. I know it well, I’ve played it several times with friends, I’ve always liked it but thought it was on the edge of being ‘over the top’. The Bennewitz played it with such intensity that I saw how wrong I have been. It’s a tremendous work, and their passion was equal to it. My school music teacher used to say to us, his orchestra, “I want blood on the floor”, to try to get us to put some expression into our playing. The Bennewitz put blood on the floor in bucket loads, without for a moment over-egging it. It was a great performance of a great piece.

One of the many interesting things we learnt from Stepan Jezek was that the cellist of the great Smetana Quartet, whose life had been dedicated to promoting Czech music, had recently died. He went on to say why, for them, it is Smetana, rather than Dvorak, who is the epitome of Czech composition; that it is Smetana who sought to write music in new ways that would penetrate deeper into the Czech soul.

Can music really be nationalistic in this way? Certainly composers can use folk tunes and folk dance rhythms in their music but isn’t that merely a means to an end, the end being to write music that speaks to human beings regardless of national feeling? Benjamin Britten was inspired by Indonesian gamelan music but it doesn’t mean he was writing Indonesian nationalist music. I puzzled over this all the way home and came to this conclusion. Every composer writes in a way that is conditioned by his background. Elgar sounds ‘English’ and Debussy ‘French’ without either of them being nationalistic (I’m thinking of the cello concerto not Pomp and Circumstance). But Dvorak and Smetana were writing as Bohemians at a time when their country did not exist as a nation state. We know about the formation of Czechoslovakia in 1918 but they didn’t. Their desire to stress their national identity was as strong as the feelings of a Scot listening to the bagpipes, and who would want to disparage that? For both those composers their nationalism mattered deeply and it added depth to their music.

Andrew Fraser Polmear

The Corn Exchange, 16 December 2012

We’ve seen quite a bit of the Heath Quartet since they became quartet in residence at the Dome 2 years ago. There’s a lot to be said for getting to know one Quartet well: it’s interesting to see how their playing changes over time, and how they tackle one composer when we’ve heard them playing other, very different pieces. It also allows us to get to recognise them as individual players and to see how that individuality merges into the whole.

Oliver Heath is immediately recognisable. He sits very upright and has the best cut jacket and tightest trousers in the business. There is something elegant, composed, even masterly about his posture, not to mention his playing. Cerys Jones, on second violin is the opposite, much more free moving – she adopts a positively combative stance, legs apart, when the music gets a bit fierce. Gary Pomeroy on viola seems to smile throughout. I asked him once if he was really smiling and he said he wasn’t aware of it. Perhaps it’s how he looks when he concentrates. Anyway, it makes him a joy to watch. Christopher Murray on cello used to be the least demonstrative of the four but no longer. He now looks as though he’s really enjoying himself, and even allows himself a rueful smile on the one occasion he got a bit behind with a fast passage.

Does this matter? It does to me. It’s part of the experience of being there; of hearing the music played by human beings. It makes it all the more extraordinary that they then play as one: the tone of their instruments so similar and complementary, their phrasing identical, their ensemble so impeccable.

The concert started with the leader with his back to the raised seats, with the second violin opposite him, and the cello to his left and the viola to his right. You can only do this in the round and it emphasises the relationship between the two violins – sometimes together, sometimes in opposition. Playing in the round has the disadvantage that we hear most clearly the instruments that point towards us. I don’t find this a huge problem and it is more than overcome by the great advantage of playing in the round: that more people can get close to the players. Judging from the numbers who get there early to claim those front row seats, I am not alone in liking this.

At last, the music. The Mozart quartet in E flat starts quietly. Mozart marked it piano but they seemed to play it pianissimo with little or no vibrato – an ethereal sound. They really trusted the acoustics of the Corn Exchange; they knew they would still be heard. And at the forte 12 bars later the contrast was stunning. That set the tone for the whole piece: exquisitely delicate playing set off against boisterous loud passages. I’ve never heard it played quite like that before and never heard it played as well. Tempi were fast but never sounded rushed. The Andante was also relatively fast but still had a sense of stillness because of that quiet delicate playing.

Britten’s Three Divertimenti were tremendous. They are full of fun – swooping glissadi, lots of pizzicato, the instruments moving from the bottom to the top of their ranges. Chris Darwin, in his programme notes, comments that its premier at the Wigmore Hall in 1936 was met with “sniggers and cold silence”. Today’s audience was grinning broadly at the joy in the piece.

The Heath did everything they could to bring the third Tchaikovsky quartet to life, but I don’t find it a successful composition. There are a lot of notes, and every now and then a Tchaikovsky-like tune emerges, but it doesn’t seem to amount to much. It was no fault of the Heath, however, and Oliver’s playing, when Tchaikovsky slips into his violin concerto-like writing, showed that he could have a career as a soloist if he wanted. But he couldn’t possibly; this Quartet is too special.

Andrew Polmear