29 June 2007
The Allegri Quartet
Haydn Quartet Op76 No 1 in G major
Bartok Quartet No 6
Beethoven Quartet Op59 No 3 in C major
If the weather did not match that for the earlier concerts, the music certainly did. The Allegri began with Haydn, a quartet from his "Sturm und Drang" period, played with the combination of delicacy and joyous excitement that we have come to expect.
The mood abruptly turned serious for Bartok's Quartet No 6. Written while the composer was still in Hungary during the period before the outbreak of World War II, it expresses all the grief and desperation that we might expect a sensitive man to feel at the realisation that World War I had not, after all, been "the war to end all wars". At the same time, Pal reassured us, in his introduction, that No 6 is a much more audience-friendly than No 5! In this piece, the Quartet had the difficult task of making sense for us of music that expressed the despair, ferocity and chaos that Bartok was expressing, a task in which they most certainly achieved success. One of the great advantages of having the musicians introduce the music is that it provides sidelights on other parts of the repertoire and suggestions for further listening. I doubt I am the only one of the audience who is now greatly intrigued by the "audience-unfriendly" Quartet No 5!
After the interval the Quartet returned for Beethoven's Quartet Op 59 No3 from the "Rasoumovsky" set. This performance glowed with the beauty of tone that never faltered even in the hair-raising final movement, which opens with a fugue known to be one of the supreme tests for a violist. The rapturous applause which greeted the final note was testimony to the way in which we had been carried away by a performance full of exhileration, a match for the "subtlety and finesse" that Stravinsky found in Beethoven's writing.
Rachel Wright
Committee Member