SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

SEEN AND HEARD UK CONCERT REVIEW

Beethoven and Brahms:  Barbirolli Quartet: Rakhi Singh, Katie Stillman (violin), Ella Brinch (viola), Ashok Kouda (cello). National Museum Wales, Cardiff, 17.1.2010 (GPu)

 

Beethoven String Quartet in A, Op. 18, No.5

Brahms String Quartet in C minor, Op.51, No.1

 

The Barbirolli Quartet, founded in 2003 at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, is one of the most distinguished and promising of the young British-based quartets. They have already notched up quite a few awards – including a Tunnell Trust Award; they have been selected by ECHO (the European Concert Halls Organisation) to undertake a European tour in 2010, which will take them to important venues in Amsterdam, Paris, Salzburg, Cologne, Stockholm, Athens, Barcelona and elsewhere. My description of them as ‘promising’ is not, I hasten to add, intended to carry any of that air of polite reservation which the use of the term can sometimes bear; they already very accomplished and very well worth hearing – but they will doubtless get even better with greater maturity.

The programme they played for this concert in the series of lunchtime concerts held in the Reardon Smith Theatre of the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, was made up of a vividly contrasting pair of quartets (though, interestingly, each was part of the first set of quartets to be published by its composer). The Quartet in A is perhaps the most ‘classical’ of Beethoven’s six opus 18 quartets; urbane and at ease with itself, it is marked by echoes of Mozart’s K464 quartet, with which it shares a key (so much so that it has been described as a ‘commentary’ on the earlier work). In her words of introduction the Barbirolli’s leader spoke of it as a “sunny” and essentially “sprightly” work, epithets it surely merits. Brahms’s C minor quartet, on the other hand is very far being bathed in sunlight; cellist Ashok Kouda introduced this work (describing it as his “favourite piece of music in the world ever”!) and spoke of it in terms of “darkness” and “intensity”.

The Barbirolli’s Beethoven was full of vivacity, and the spirit of the dance was never very far away. The opening allegro had a delightful, inviting sense of instrumental conversation, sometimes quasi-domestic, sometimes implicitly dramatic. In the minuet which follows (as it does in K464), the playing of the two violins in the opening phrase (to be repeated several times in the movement) was strikingly beautiful and the later variations on the theme were also very attractive; much of the movement had a thoroughly Viennese lilt to it, especially in the waltz melody of the trio. In the ensuing andante there was some real emotional weight, but not too much; the whole was very well paced and the way in which the music constantly changes the relationships between the two voices was very persuasively shaped. The opening of the final allegro, though, sounded just a little inhibited, even a little heavy-handed; but as the movement continued more air was let in, and the well-judged contrasts of tempo and dynamics contributed to a sense of unforced finality, of comfortable arrival at an expected destination. Rakhi Singh’s introductory remarks had spoken of this “youthful” work as a “gem” – and pretty well all of the gem’s facets shone brightly in this engaging performance.

Brahms’s first quartet (or, at any rate, the first that he published – he claimed to have worked on twenty predecessors without before being satisfied with the results!) is an altogether more sombre affair. It is a quartet to which the word tragic has often been applied, and with good enough reason. If I say that this performance by the young Barbirolli Quartet wasn’t one to which that epithet was perfectly applicable, I don’t intend to criticise it, but merely to try to say what was distinctive about it. There was plenty of troubled passion in the opening allegro, plenty of that intensity of which Ashok Kouda had spoken in introducing the work. Indeed there was a kind of feverish turbulence (at no cost to discipline) in their reading of the work; there may have been less sheer gravitas than can be heard in some performances, but by way of rich compensation there was a stormy impetuosity. In the second movement, marked ‘Romanze, poco adagio’ there was a certain tranquillity after the violence of the opening storm, but it was never a tranquillity that went long untroubled, being shot through with an apprehension of future disturbance and permeated by a strong sense of melancholy. The movement’s complex rhythms were very skilfully handled, the pauses and silences full of anticipatory awareness. Like the second, the third movement spoke of night more than day, being dominated by a troubled pathos, enlivened only briefly by the pizzicato writing of the trio – the light-heartedness of which felt like no more than a brief respite. The opening bars of the brief closing allegro spoke of renewed anger and ferocity and the ensemble work here was particularly accomplished, the energy sustained in what, though it recapitulates materials from both the first and second movements, felt less like a neat resolution than an insistence all too likely to be repeated. The Barbirolli’s reading of this quartet conveyed their evident enthusiasm for it; I have heard weightier, more fully ‘tragic’ readings of the work; but this performance had about it a particular youthful anguish, as though the music expressed not so much the weight of fully realised tragic experience but rather the youthful anticipation of suffering to come, a youthful apprehension of the human condition. The results were compelling.

 

Glyn Pursglove