Author: SA Office

The Corn Exchange, Sunday 18th November 2012

The Corn Exchange was different today. Sun shone through the great south windows all morning, the heating was perfect, the seats were arranged with intelligence, that is on three and a quarter sides instead of four, so that no-one was unsighted by the piano lid, and the spotlights on the players seemed to be warmer in colour than usual; at least so it seemed when the female players sat down in sleeveless black dresses to reveal golden arms and shoulders. And while I’m praising the Dome I want to mention the page-turner, a man whose name I don’t know but who has turned pages in Brighton for longer than I can remember, and always with the same reliable assurance. It’s not easy to do, and an uncertain page-turner can unsettle a whole audience, which he never has. Thank you, Sir.

They started with Rachmaninov’s Trio élégiaque, a short piece in one movement that he wrote as a student. It’s simple, very romantic, ends with a funereal dirge, and it’s usually played in the expressive romantic over-the-top way that it seems to call for. The Aquinas did the opposite. Much of it they played quietly. They relied on the beauty of their sound and their exquisite phrasing to bring out the passion of the music. As a result, the emotion of the piece got in under our radar; they seemed to do so little and I’ve never heard it played so beautifully.

The second piece was Mendelssohn’s second piano trio, a big, complex work of fun and fury, with engaging tunes and extraordinary grace. Is there anyone who still thinks Mendelssohn is a light-weight? By the end of the first movement it was clear what this trio are about. Firstly, they play with extraordinary sweetness and delicacy. In this they are helped, for the moment, by the fact that the violinist and cellist were playing on borrowed Guarneri instruments from 1691 and 1693 respectively, but I can’t believe they wouldn’t sound the same whatever the instrument; they might just have to work harder to achieve it. Secondly, they play as one, not just with impeccable intonation and perfect ensemble, but in the way they interpret the music: understated but not unfeeling, emotional but not showy. The pianist, Martin Cousin, has one of the softest pair of hands in the business. He was able to merge with the strings and not dominate them, making the Yamaha piano as expressive as the strings. Perhaps it helped that it was a fairly ordinary grand piano and not the larger Steinway concert grand that most concert halls think they need to provide, even for chamber music.

By this time the audience was totally won over, the applause at the end of the Mendelssohn being enough for the end of a concert for most ensembles. And at the end of the concert we got an encore, which is not routine after such big works.

The Dvorak Trio No. 3 is another big work, full of tunes, and changes of mood, and the Aquinas worked the same magic on it and on us. What happens when an audience feels transported in the way we did this morning? It helps that they were a joy to look at, with youth and beauty on their side. It helps that they seemed very comfortable in front of us, that they move about expressively (on their chairs – they don’t walk about) as they play, that the two women, superficially alike with their blond hair and black gowns, reveal very different playing personalities. The violinist, Ruth Rogers, remains poised and elegant, with only the odd frown or raising of her eyebrows, while Katherine Jenkinson, the cellist, reveals every emotion on her face, alive with joy then almost tearful as the music changes to anguish.

Something happens at a concert like this that is more than the sum of the parts. It’s why recording will never take the place of live performance. It’s that we had an experience that we contributed to, and which we come out of changed, if only for a short while. Those who stayed behind in the Dome foyer afterwards for a few minutes found there was yet another dimension to the Trio; they are also really nice young people who have children and who drink coca cola. Oh well, no-one’s perfect (and I don’t mean the children – they were).

Andrew Polmear

The Endymion at the Corn Exchange, 28th October 2012

a personal view by Andrew Polmear

I wasn’t really looking forward to this concert. I’ve always found the clarinet rather limited in the range of sound it can make. And it seems that the great composers have felt the same, judging by how little chamber music there is for clarinet, at least until the 20^th century. In fact, it’s usually the Mozart and Brahms clarinet quintets that are played and we have heard the Brahms as recently as this year’s Brighton Festival. In addition, a light rain was falling as we walked down to the Dome.

Why does everything change when we walk into the Corn Exchange? It’s a barn of a place and, frankly, it was a bit underheated. But the circle of chairs around the performers’ dais draws us in. Perhaps too it’s the knowledge that these events are only happening because of a grass-roots movement by members of the audience of the Old Market Coffee Concert series before they folded. These are our concerts and we want them to work.

Feeling better I picked up the programme to find that the clarinettist was Tony Pay; one the great British clarinettists as well as someone I knew from University. He’s not a member of Endymion but was guesting with them. I was cheering up no end. Then they came in, Tony carrying something that definitely was not a clarinet. It was light brown in colour and so long that when he sat down it rested on his calves. Then he stood up to explain himself. At last! We’ve asked many times if performers would talk about themselves, the music, their instruments, anything really, but so far they have declined. It’s galling to be so close to them that we can hear them breathing, and not have at least one of them relate to us other than through the music.

What Tony said was as good as the fact that he was talking: briefly he was going to play on a 19^th century clarinet with an extra length added. This gave it an extra octave of bass notes, equivalent to the basset clarinet for which Mozart originally wrote his quintet. Also, he ended his talk casually, they would play ‘K’ by Philip Venables first as a prelude to the Mozart.

‘K’ started with high harmonics from the strings, so high they were almost painful, then gradually the sounds came lower, warmer, still no tune yet, no recognisable harmonies, then over a total of 7 minutes the notes of the opening two bars of the Mozart could be heard. It was like mist clearing from round a building, slowly revealing its shape. A brief pause, music changed on the stands, and the Mozart started, those slow descending notes that we’ve heard so many times before but never with such relief. It was like coming home. Perhaps some people didn’t like it. Some people don’t like the glass pyramid in the centre of the Louvre courtyard. I find that putting the old and the new together makes me see both in a new light.

But the best thing was the way they played the Mozart. Some players go for a mellifluous sound throughout, as though they, like the old me, think that that’s all a clarinet can do. But this playing was warm, committed, spanning the whole range of emotions. And the elongated clarinet made a different sound from that highly polished black clarinet that we are used to; a little muted, more gentle, a perfect match for the strings. A few things weren’t perfect. The ensemble wasn’t as good as we are used to from players who do nothing but  play together in a quartet. There were odd duff notes from the strings, but only because they were playing daringly and taking risks.  These are the things that make live performance so much more exciting than a recording.

Thank goodness for the interval; I could not have gone straight on from that to the Brahms. It was another committed performance, this time bringing out the turbulence and tension in this late work by the ageing Brahms. On a few high entries Tony, now on a glossy black clarinet, shrieked the anguish that’s in the music.

A great concert – and great to see the performers afterwards in the bar.

Endymion Ensemble at Brighton Dome Corn Exchange, Sunday, 28th October 2012  

Review by Richard Amey

There is a fascinating notion thrown up by the root source of Brahms’ Clarinet Quintet that appears to fly in the face of rivalry and prejudice in musical criticism and heroic allegiance in late 1800s Vienna.

This memorable piece was performed by one of our long-standing top clarinettists Anthony Pay as he guested for the first time with the Endymion Ensemble, at the Strings Attached Coffee Concert on 28th October. Their job was to present the mellow fruitfulness of Brahms’ inspiration in the autumn of his life, derived from Richard Műhlfeld, who was probably the outstanding clarinettist of his time, and whose exceptional skill and taste re-lit the faded flame of Brahms’ desire to compose.

It’s easy to read into this great chamber music elegies for all the friends the lonely Brahms had survived as he looked back over his life and forward to mortality. He will have ruminated on a career of European fame while being held up by Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick as the pillar of conservatism in a war of words against the oncoming romantics Liszt and Wagner whose own vociferous supporters counter-attacked.

Some of the most sensuous, evocative and pictorial recent music for the clarinet had been written by Wagner.   And for more than a decade following Wagner’s death, who should be the principal clarinettist conveying his music in the festival opera orchestra at famous Bayreuth, but Műhlfeld?  Wagner was undoubtedly Műhlfeld’s own inspiration. Now, here was Brahms, himself a highly sensual composer within his stricter formal straitjacket, resuscitating on that (to some) controversial oxygen. Hanslick’s thoughts on this ironical ‘treachery’ are unrecorded, even had he realised the link.

On Sunday, the clocks having gone back an hour, a typically reverential, languid opening movement of the Brahms Clarinet Quintet would complement perfectly some extra time in bed. But the Endymions adopted a quicker tempo and the agitations and unsettlings often smoothed over by slower, oily interpretations were now alive and insistent in our ears. Golden, lying dead leaves were now brown, windblown and disturbed.

The second movement hinted at passions and regrets, of which Brahms had a several, and so continued a stimulating and revelatory reading of this music, and an absorbing and masterly demonstration of its rewardingly unique range of expression.

Already, the morning had begun with this work’s chief predecessor and model of more than 100 years before, similarly a late-in-life work, the Clarinet Quintet of Mozart.

Here the Endymion had something special on offer from their 23-year-old artistic director Philip Venables: a short, custom-composed reflection on the Mozart serving in performance as a prelude to it. Entitled ‘K’ (a nod to the Mozart cataloguer, Köchel), the strings emerge from silence into a series of sustained textures, finally hinting at the first theme of the Quintet, to be joined unobtrusively only then by the clarinet.

Wolfgang Amadeus then pops his head around the door and the Quintet proper is up and away.  Such warmth, originality, such freshness and roundedness of utterance, such clarity of content and logic in form came to us with vigour and appropriate grace under the hands of violinists Jackie Shave and Clara Bliss, violist Asdis Valdimarsdottir and cellist Adrian Bradbury, with the sumptuous depth and range of Pay’s basset clarinet sound the cream on the Viennese whirl.

He played a light-coloured boxwood instrument from the 1850s, modified in the 1960s, bought from the late Alan Hacker. For the Brahms – Pay, sporting a beard and head of hair almost as full as the composer himself – then played the Brahms on a 1908 Buffet clarinet.

The Endymions, performing in the round, were surrounded rightly by a substantial audience. And this programme, the world’s two masterworks in this instrumental combination in one sitting, was a treat on paper – and a sheer joy and stimulation in the flesh.

Richard Amey

Next Coffee Concert:  Piano Trio on Sunday, November 18 (11am): Rachmaninov Trio Elegaique No 1 in G minor Opus posthumous); Mendelssohn Piano Trio No 2 in C minor Opus 66; Dvorak Piano Trio No 3 in F minor.

 

 

 

By Richard Amey, written for The Worthing Herald and published with the author’s permission

ANYONE believing that string quartet musicians are of the dourer slices of the classical music personality pie chart will have stood corrected by the opening work of Strings Attached’s new season of Coffee Concerts at Brighton’s Dome on Sunday.

With the father of the string quartet, Haydn, heading its repertoire, displaying no sense of humour threatens your artistic credibility. The opening work on Sunday morning in the Corn Exchange was the sixth and final quartet of Haydn’s Opus 60 publication and The Castalian Quartet’s projection of the particular humour on its final page simply had me laughing.

How can any composer be complete without the ability to convey humour — over and beyond mere wit? Thus it follows for string quartet ensembles. And the likelihood of being made to chuckle delights string quartet audiences. Haydn is fun as well as all this other great attributes and even though new first violinist Daniel Pioro was making only his fourth appearance with Castalians, no newcomer needs to learn the humour of Haydn.

Found in the excellent accompanying Coffee Concert companion programme, Brighton violinist, violist and quartet player Chris Darwin’s programme notes also make the reader smile broadly. Significant?

Pioro is trying out after the departure of Canadian, Sadie Fields, and 2^nd violin Daniel Llewellyn Roberts reports a consequent change in their sound from romantically tinged to a more open one.

The Castalian Quartet made its Wigmore Hall debut in January. The personality of French violist Charlotte Bonneton caught the eye and ear as the epitomy of a young quartet alive and unified in its alertness to nuance and subtleness of touch, as much as to rhythm and texture. While Bonneton brings visually a sense of excitement and anticipation, cellist Rebecca Herman’s lighter touch, not just in her pizzicato, gives the Castalians a spring and an airiness.

With complete confidence, the Quartet stepped from their final exhuberance in the Eb of the Haydn to the F minor of Beethoven’s Opus 95 —the immensely condensed ‘Quartett Serioso’ which is one of the greatest string quartets in the entire repertoire. It’s music speaking of worry, disturbance and fright, with fleeting and possibly false consolation. At this time, Beethoven was moving knowingly into his final years of deaf isolation and cosmic contemplation while unable to hear and partake in the full discourse the world outside.

If the Castelians’ reading lacked the vehemence and explosiveness one associates with great performances of this piece, then that lies probably around the corner when Pioro becomes fully embedded.

Dvorak’s Opus 61 in C major, written 70 years later, rounded off the morning and latterly put Pioro through his paces. We moved from post-Napoleon Vienna to 1880s Bohemia with a flow of Slavonic melody and rhythm, apparently freeing us from the angst of the pre-interval Beethoven. And as large an audience as seen at a Dome Coffee Concert since the move from Hove’s Old Market, went off happily enriched, to enjoy a reception in the Founders Room.

The stage structure being already set for the current Comedy Festival prevented this concert being staged in the round but that will return for the next Coffee Concert, by the Endymion Ensemble on October 28. “I feel far more involved in the performance when it’s in the round,” commented one audience member, undoubtedly speaking for the majority.

This new season is not just string quartets. The Endymions will play the two woodwind instrument crowns of the repertoire, the Clarinet Quintets of Mozart (K581) and Brahms (Opus 115). The Aquinas Piano Trio follow on November 18 with Rachmaninov, Mendelssohn and Dvorak.

Richard Amey

Review of the Strings Attached Annual Concert, to launch the for 2012/13 series of Coffee Concerts. Brighton Dome Corn Exchange, Sunday 7 October 2012.

What joy to be walking down to the Dome on a sunny Sunday morning for the start of a new series of coffee concerts. And especially to be going to hear the Castalian Quartet who played so wonderfully at the Brighton Festival in May. The atmosphere in the lobby was more like a party than a concert (but with coffee not wine) but the news was mixed: the leader of the Castalian was away, her place taken by a deputy. How could that possibly work? It takes years for a quartet to gel and develop its own way of playing. And they were to tackle some demanding pieces including Beethoven’s opus 95, the last quartet of his middle period and nearer to a late quartet in mood.

They started with a Haydn – the last of the Tost quartets – and all doubts were removed: impeccable ensemble, passionate but delicate playing from all, but especially the stand-in leader, Daniel Pioro. They played as though they had been together for years. The other surprise was the viola player, Charlotte Bonneton. She sits in the place usually taken by the cellist. Because they were not playing in the round but on a conventional stage this put her opposite the first violinist, and closer to the audience than usual for the viola. As a result, we heard the viola part as never before. It helps that she has a big instrument and makes a big sound. It also helps that she holds her instrument high and plays with a dramatic style. But placing her up front did help her to bring out the viola part. And this was achieved without losing any of the cellist’s contribution: she’s too good a player to be sidelined anyway and the sonority of the cello sound would never be lost despite being placed further back.

Next they played the Beethoven, starting at a tremendous pace. At first I thought it was too fast – I couldn’t keep up with all those curious little figures in the inner parts – but once I caught up I was won over. This first movement is furious and painful and their playing hammered at your soul. The second movement is a much calmer affair, starting with a slow descending scale for solo cello. Every note was crafted with exquisite tenderness. The last two movements are furious again – I was asking myself how they who are so young can have suffered enough to know how to play like this. It sounds soppy when I write it but that’s the effect Beethoven has on you.

Then, unlike last year, we had an interval and could wander out into the gardens to recover before the Dvorak opus 61. It’s a tuneful whimsical piece that I found hard to adjust to after the Beethoven but they were so tuneful and whimsical with it that it was won round.

As before, Chris Darwin’s programme notes are the best ever and free, despite being almost worth the price of the ticket themselves. And the drinks party afterwards was a treat – we were all congratulating each other on being there, and then Andrew Comben congratulated us all further by saying that Strings Attached may seem only to be supporting the coffee concerts but in fact the organisation has a much wider effect in promoting chamber music in Brighton and Hove. Now I’m home and can’t get those opening bars of the Beethoven out of my head. I need someone to make me laugh – and who should be at the Dome tonight but Jenny Eclair…

Andrew Polmear

 

Note: Chris Darwin’s Programme Notes will be available on this website well before each concert, and are found by clicking on the work in the concert list on the Coffee Concert page.

Fifty years ago, when I first started playing string quartets, we all wanted to play like the Amadeus. Then, as new quartets came on to the scene, we came to value the new interpretations that each brought with them. Now we have heard the most well known works, like Mozart’s “Dissonance” quartet, played in so many different ways that we no longer expect to be offered something totally new. And yet we were by the Kuss Quartet on the stage of the Dome Concert Hall on Sunday March 18^th. They play with a delicacy and elegancy that is quite their own and yet somehow they combine it with phrasing so expressive that you listen open-mouthed. It is like a conjuring trick; how can they convey such passion while playing in such an understated way? The answer, in the “Dissonance” Quartet, was that they remained faithful to the classical spirit of Mozart’s writing. They play quietly. they seem to allow plenty of space while playing no slower than anyone else and they bring out the meaning of every note and phrase. I was left with the image of a well-pruned apple tree. For those who are not gardeners, the principle of apple tree pruning is that you thin out the branches until you can stand under it and throw your hat up through the middle. That image captures something of the light and clarity that the Kuss’ way of playing lets into the music. All four players do it, but outstanding is the leader Jana Kuss, who has a sweetness of tone and lightness of touch to make you weep.

After the Mozart came a brilliant bit of programming: the Three Pieces for String Quartet of Stravinsky, one angular, one humorous and one tender. The whole thing only lasted 7 minutes but they were worthwhile in their own right and calmed us down after the excitement of the Mozart.

Then Tchaikovsky’s first String Quartet: would they have the power and the lyricism to sustain this work of high Romanticism? They did, and they did it with the same sweetness and expressiveness that is clearly their style. They showed that power doesn’t require volume or harshness; it just needs intensity. The muted andante cantabile is said to have made Tolstoy weep when he heard it and you could see why.

Finally, Chris Darwin’s programme notes were as clear and informative as they have been throughout the season. Who else would have been able to show so clearly how the opening four bars of the Mozart provide source material for the whole quartet; or how the Stravinsky and the “Ministry of Silly Walks” are connected through the music hall performer “Little Tich”?

 

Andrew Polmear