Coffee Concerts

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 18^th 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

 

The Corn Exchange,  Brighton Dome, Sunday March 16 2014   

Andrew Comben, who books the players for the coffee concert series, usually manages to choose players who are already in England, perhaps performing at the Wigmore Hall a day or two before or after their trip to Brighton. That wasn’t the case with the Szymanowski, who had flown in from Warsaw the morning of the concert. That may explain the slightly shaky start to Haydn Quartet Op. 33 No.1: the ensemble was wayward; the balance between the instruments was lopsided, the cello too heavy against very light tones from the violins; and a few fast passages were fluffed. They did settle down but I continued to have difficulties with their playing.

It was a very expressive reading of Haydn. The phrasing was beautifully crafted but at times too romantic for me; Haydn’s music is very much of his time and that was the eighteenth century. Playing it with too much expression strains the music beyond what it can bear. Similarly, the frequent changes of speed unsettled me. And above all, the players imposed little pauses between phrases, losing what is for me the glory of these quartets: long lines of exquisitely delicate music, always surprising the listener with changes of theme or key, while keeping everything rhythmical and understated, as though to say that everything was all right with the world. I have noticed that other Eastern European quartets play Haydn as the Szymanowski does, so it’s not right or wrong but a personal preference.

What didn’t work, for me, in the Haydn worked in spades in Szymanowsky’s Quartet No.2. This work plumbs many emotions but joy is not one of them: things are not all right in Szymanowski’s world. The first movement, muted throughout, is tender and achingly expressive, the second turbulent and disturbed, the third sombre and sad. I suspect that Szymanowski would have disapproved of my applying human emotions to a description of his music; he considered that “art stands above life, penetrates the essence of the universe”. But we have no other words to use. Now the quartet’s playing was quite wonderful, the balance perfect – those dark cello tones adding so much – the whispering lightness of the violins quite hair-raising. Such expressive playing made me feel that this was the only way to play this piece, every note was so convincing.

After the interval came the Dvorak G major quartet Op. 106. It’s a happier piece than the Szymanowski but it calls for playing that is just as expressive; and it was. If Dvorak has a weakness it is that he is prone to repeat a motif over and over again, like two tennis players, each at the back of the court, hitting the ball to and fro, waiting for an opening to emerge. The playing was so lyrical, at times tender, at times passionate, that for once I didn’t mind how long it went on.

I liked the way the Quartet looked; each man was clearly a character in his own right. They looked very at ease on stage, ready to enjoy what they were about to play. Friends behind me, however, commented that a trip to a barber, followed by a trip to a tailor, plus the purchase of a metronome, might have been a good idea. I was only prepared to agree about the metronome, and then only for Haydn. I would travel some way to hear them play anything from Beethoven onwards provided they play, and look, just as they do now.

Incidentally, that lovely encore was “Melody” by Myroslav Skoryk. Type ‘Skoryk’ into Youtube and you can see the piece played by the Szymanowsky Quartet themselves. 

Andrew Polmear