Coffee Concerts

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