Coffee Concerts

 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 Dome took a risk with this one. Just to get things clear, the Dome chooses and books the players, Strings Attached looks after the audience, and keeps the Dome informed about what that audience wants. That Strings Attached audience, descended as it is from the Old Market Coffee Concert audience, is used, in the main, to string quartets from the 18^th and 19^th century. Here, on 20th January 2013, they got 20^th and 21^st century pieces for tenor, horn and piano, the only strings being a cello in the opening piece.

It worked, judging from the buzz in the interval and at the end. It worked because the performers were world class, they related to their audience as though they were comfortable with us and interested in us, and the music was sometimes great and always interesting. Also there was a satisfying logic to the pieces; connections were made between the Richard Rodney Bennett, Britten and Gerald Barry pieces stylistically, between the Poulenc and the Britten via Denis Brain the horn player, between the Walton and the Britten, the words of both written by Edith Sitwell.

The programme began with Richard Rodney Bennett’s Tom O’Bedlam, new I imagine, like much of this programme, to the audience. It’s a powerful setting of a poem from the 17^th century, for tenor and cello. It’s stark, uncomfortable music in which the cello and voice intertwine, react with each other, and sometimes go off on their own. Committed performances from Mark Padmore and Caroline Dearnley brought it to life, the cold image of the mad beggar enhanced by the branches of the trees in the Pavilion Gardens, heavy with snow, seen through the Corn Exchange windows behind the performers. An extra excitement was that Caroline played, for the first time, from music on the screen of her iPad rather than from a printed score. There was a practical reason for this: the music doesn’t stop for her to turn the page and there are thirteen pages. However, to the delight of the technophobes in the audience, the foot pedal that should have moved the image on the screen failed, and Caroline had to have the screen changed by an assistant manually.

Poulenc’s Elégie for horn and piano is an easier piece to get a handle on but it’s not the languorous writing of his songs. It’s strangely declamatory, finally resolving into an ending that is quiet and peaceful, the horn part played by Richard Watkins with just about the quietest playing I have ever heard from the horn.

The world premiere of Gerald Barry’s Jabberwocky followed. The words are from the Lewis Carroll poem but sung in French then in German. It was performed with utter conviction by Mark Padmore and Huw Watkins on piano. The performance stays with me still but I’m not sure the music would alone.

After the interval William Walton’s three songs were fun – Mark Padmore convincing again in English, Spanish and American modes. But then everything changed. The opening of Britten’s Canticle III Still Falls the Rain is enough to stop the heart: a plainsong-like refrain moving slowly in semitones and repeated with every verse as Edith Sitwell uses the Crucifixion to describe the fate of mankind. And then in the middle of music of unbearable intensity, the tenor speaks these words from Marlowe’s Dr Faustus:

“ O Ile leap up to my God
Who pulles me doune
See, see where Christ’s blood streames in the firmament”.

It was worth struggling through the snow for this piece alone; worth it for those three spoken lines.

Andrew 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