Coffee Concerts

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.

Calefax Reed Quintet – the Second Coffee Concert 2014 – 2015

Coffee Concert 16 November 2014 Calefax Reed Quintet

Review by Andrew Polmear

It was wonderful to be back in the round after the enforced use of a stage last time. Or rather, we were in a square with raked seating to north and south and just two rows of seats to east and west. This gave better sightlines than we have ever had before and was voted, in my small survey, the best arrangement so far.

There was much about Calefax that was engaging from the moment they walked on: they looked happy to be there, serious but intending to enjoy themselves, every one in a different suit that matched his personality: the white pinstripes worn by one player were pure Chicago 1920s and, yes, he was the saxophonist. Also, no chairs. We are used to players standing but not moving the way these men did: each swaying to the music, none more gracefully than the bass clarinettist, tall and slender like his instrument. Two players duetting would move closer to each other; the oboeist, on a solo, would step back to pit himself against the other four. They didn’t seem to need to read their parts; they knew these pieces backwards and it showed.

And their musicianship was astounding. Each player a virtuoso in his own right, they achieved a balance that I would not have thought possible with five such disparate instruments: oboe, clarinet, saxophone, bass clarinet and bassoon. Every note was exquisitely phrased, every passage blended into what the other four were doing.

But what were they doing arranging pieces by the great masters who never intended them for reed quintet? They started with Bach’s Concerto for Solo Organ BWV 596, and one can say for sure that Bach would not have minded one bit. He himself had transcribed it from Vivaldi’s concerto for two violins and cello. Great music, played with understanding, can survive transcription for other instruments and doing so can even bring out aspects of the music not previously apparent. As written by Bach this is a complex piece and some of the interweaving subtleties would have been hard to follow when played on an organ. With Calefax the deepest innards of the piece were clear. However, speaking of great music, by the interval I had one reservation: Mozart’s Fantasy for Mechanical Organ and Beethoven’s Variations on God Save the King are not great works and my fear was that Calefax had found itself forced to limit itself to minor works. Indeed, Beethoven’s string quartets, for instance, are so specifically for string quartet that transcribing them for reed quintet would seem unwise.

The second half of the programme dispelled all fears. I know Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin as a piano piece but for me it grew hugely in stature played by Calefax – the attack, the whimsy, the plangent solos, the plunging and soaring runs by one instrument at a time, were thrilling. And An American in Paris was a triumph. It was written for symphony orchestra plus celesta, saxophones, and automobile horns, but Calefax filled the Corn Exchange with melody and rhythm and nothing seemed to be missing. Gershwin himself referred to it as “a light, jolly piece”. If he’d heard that final glorious reprise of the “jazz” theme in the final section, when Raaf Hekkema finally let rip with his sax at full blast, even Gershwin might have been persuaded that it was great music.

Borromini Quartet 26th October 2014 – Review by Richard Amey, Worthing Herald

Coffee Concert at Brighton Corn Exchange on Sunday October 26 (11am) – Borromini Quartet: James Toll, Naomi Burrell (violins), Sam Kennedy (viola), Dave Edmonds (cello).

HAYDN this summer has had a huge worldwide audience who may not have even realised it was him they were listening to. TV football famously commandeered Puccini for its Italian World Cup with its Turandot ‘I Will Win’ aria from the larynx and chest of Pavarotti. This year in Brazil, Haydn managed by stealth to have his voice heard before every match the triumphant Germans played, and wound up overturing the Final.

The post-war Germans upliftingly commandeered Haydn’s Emperor String Quartet slow movement variation theme from way back in the early 19th Century for their modern national anthem. Already, Haydn (actually Austrian) had been lauded similarly in England when verses by John Newton, who died in 1807 two years before Haydn, were matched to the same tune to create the hymn ‘Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken’ – and they named the tune ‘Austria’ in the hymn books.

A music publisher sold six string quartets billed as by Haydn when, as realised not until the 1960s, they were really by Roman Hofstetter, a contemporary Benedictine monk, choirmaster, organist, and self-confessedly huge Haydn fan. What gave the game away was Haydn’s name on some string parts, discovered to have been insufficiently obliterated by the scoundrel publisher, Bailleux.

These quartets are catalogued by previously convinced historians at Haydn’s Opus 3 and we could hear that No 5 in F major was far too pretty, languorous and comfy to be even early Haydn when Borromini Quartet opened their Coffee Concert with it on Sunday. But it is still noted for its Serenade-like Andante, in which the long solo violin melody was played by James Toll to charming pizzicato accompaniment, with second violin and viola plucked on the lap like guitars.

The Borromini then gave us music by Arriaga. His Symphony and three quartets sealed his revered reputation as Spain’s own Mozart or Schubert before, at 19, an infected lung claimed his life during his fourth year as a Spaniard in Paris. His music has exceptional vitality, integrity and intriguing appeal, though the No 1 in D minor this morning lacked something of that sparkle and energy in Borromini’s hands. They seemed to miss the boat here for apparent want of commitment.

The reason, however, was our Spanish autumn. This morning, the clocks suddenly saying 11am though it was really midday, sprang a second falsehood with an unexpectedly warm and humid Corn Exchange, barometered up by a large audience. This was the Coffee Concerts’ annual link-up with the Brighton Early Music Festival and the Borromini’s extra-sensitive, all-gut-stringed period instruments made them more vulnerable to the atmosphere than steel-stringed modern ones.

The clue was in the extra-long time they took to tune up before taking the stage unfortunately still set up for the Brighton Comedy Festival instead of the standard in-the-round arrangement. Intonation became unstable and under this stress ensemble occasionally suffered. They had to acclimatise to this with great care. But after the interval, anxieties were left behind in faster, livelier music kicked off by Boccherini’s F major Quartet Opus 64 with its outer movements quicker than anything we’d heard hitherto.

Boccherini was an Italian mostly in Madrid, enlarging the concert’s undeclared theme of displaced composers or works, and this performance restored the normally invigorating Coffee Concerts feel. So then what, away from Vienna and Esterhazy, was Haydn doing in England in his late 50s? Europe’s favourite composer, he’d himself been commandeered by promoter and violinist Peter Salomon deliberately to take London − and thereby the nation − by storm.

Haydn unerringly delivered the goods in arguably classical music’s most famously successful foreign tour. And in between the 12 symphonies that sent the audiences into delirium and earned Haydn an honorary Oxford University doctorate as well as a fortune, he wrote quartets. With one of these, The Rider, the Manchester-formed Borrominis galloped away into the afternoon in some triumph.

The music of this Opus 74 No 3 in G is from Haydn at his accumulative zenith and the Borromini found the bite and attack necessary to remind us of the fact. As well as the familiar up-tempo horsey rhythms, there is a slower one in the first movement that could easily land Haydn at the next Olympics: its feel is pure-poise dressage. Having already helped soccer players with his music, maybe he’ll help win someone else an equestrian medal. And it might not be a German if one of the other nations gets there first and chooses it.

So, a fascinating historical morning at the Coffee Concerts with repertoire identifying it as a Brighton Early Music Festival event, and our listening pathway guided and illuminated as always by Chris Darwin’s programme notes. His writing is next to be recognised and presented at a major London concert venue. But if Londoners think they’re reading a Londoner they’ll be wrong. Darwin’s (actually) from Hove.

Richard Amey

This season’s Coffee Concerts (all free of charge to ages 8-25) contains extra instrumental variety. The next: Sunday November 16 – Calefax Reed Quintet. Arrangements of Bach/Vivaldi, Concerto in D for 2 violins and cello; Mozart, organ piece K608; Beethoven, piano Variations on God Save The King; Ravel, Suite from Le Tombeau de Couperin; Gershwin, An American In Paris.

Borromini Quartet – The First Coffee Concert 2014 – 2015

The Corn Exchange, Brighton Dome, Sunday 26 October 2014

No concert is an island unto itself. This, the first in the 2014/15 series of coffee concerts in the Corn Exchange, came on the back of the concert by the Szymanowski Quartet at the end of the last series. In my review of that concert I bemoaned the fact that they played Haydn like Tchaikovsky. So I was especially looking forward to the Borromini Quartet since, as 18th century specialists, they seemed likely to be at the other end of the spectrum.

Things started extremely well. The quartet by Hoffstetter, still published by Peters as Haydn opus 3 No. 5, is a lightweight piece ideally suited to the Borromini style. With their gut strings and late baroque bows (except for the first violin) they played with exquisite delicacy and silky tone. The slow movement went especially well, never rising above piano – and a Borromini piano is very, very quiet. You were compelled to listen hard and it was lovely.

The Arriaga quartet No.1 fared less well. It’s a flamboyant piece and while the slow movement, again, was successful I wanted more robustness in the other movements. I was surprised to find markings of fortissimo and piano in the only edition available online. I didn’t feel they ever got above mezzoforte. Fortissimo is hard with a baroque bow that you are holding by the stick rather than the frog. Modern bows were already in use when the piece was written so it would have been authentic, and would have served them better, to have changed bows. Disappointment led to my being irritated by the odd failure of ensemble and difficulties with intonation, although there they had my sympathies. After just a few minutes their gut strings must have been awfully flat in the overheated and humid hall.

In the interval I detected an audience with reservations. They hadn’t heard any great music and they were feeling that the playing was all too much the same with little variation in dynamics and with phrasing that was too understated.

The second half started with Boccherini’s last quartet. A contemporary of Haydn he wrote in a style more Italian than Viennese. It was lively, unusual, but more interesting than overwhelming. But the breakthrough, for me, came with the Haydn opus 74 No.3. The playing was still silky smooth and delicate, which made for a lovely slow movement, but they did much more as well, bringing out the dynamic variations, the fluctuations of mood, the extraordinarily inventive writing. At the start of the last movement the first violin tore into the ‘galloping’ theme, putting some power into his playing for the first time, although the second violin was hard put to match him with her baroque bow and grip.

So where did that leave me? I favour authentic playing when the music calls for it, rather than because it’s historically correct. Here their style was perfectly suited to the Hofstetter and the Boccherini. But to play the Arriaga and the Haydn in a large hall before a large audience required a bigger sound. To return to where I began, I’m not calling for an interpretation that goes beyond what is there in the music. I’m just looking for playing that finds the drama in the piece as well as the elegance, and projects it to the back of the hall.

 

Andrew Polmear