Kammermusiksaal Hermann J. Abs, Bonn
String
Quartet no.9 in C major, op.59 no.3
String
Quartet no.14 in C-sharp minor, op.131
Benjamin Nabarro, Duncan Grant (violins)
Simone van der Giessen (viola)
Marie Bitlloch (cello)
Grave
fragility, almost yet not quite without vibrato, characterised the introduction
to the first movement of the third Razumovsky
Quartet in this performance from the Elias Quartet. Then came the exposition
proper, as if a command to ‘snap out’ of such melancholy or worse, to bring us
into the present. Its good humour, however, did not betoken any lack of
serious. This was cultivated playing, full of life, somewhere between brusque
and boisterous. Later on, the infectious mystery of Beethoven’s – and the
players’ – trilling prepared us for a recapitulation that had more than a few
surprises left to spring. The second movement was eerily founded on a cello
pizzicato (Marie Bitlloch) both angry and sweet. An inward turn of darker
harmonies was rightly unnerving, but this was quite rightly a performance of
many voices and moods. That underlying onward trudge that seems Schubertian,
yet which it seems strange actually to call so, was in sensitive, comprehending
hands throughout. A relatively relaxed minuet – Beethoven marks it ‘grazioso’ –
offered something of a backward, even neoclassical glance, giving way to a
tenser trio, teeming with counterpoint and seeming preparing the way for the
finale. This frenetic performance captured its madness, although there were
times when it seemed to run away with itself before regrouping.
The
strangeness of the key, C-sharp minor, especially for strings, registered
immediately in the performance of the op.131 Quartet; so too did the rarity, in
every sense, of Beethoven’s writing therein. ‘Unearthly’ may be a cliché – what
is not when writing about this music? – yet how else might one characterise
such seraphic sweetness as was to be heard in this work’s extraordinary first
movement? ‘The most melancholy thing ever said in music,’ according to Wagner:
who are we to disagree? Bach’s abiding presence, crucial to both composers in
later life, was revealed in struggle and sweetness alike. Much the same might
be said of the next two movements, if not on the surface, then beneath, where
the truest action and sentiment are to be found. Fragility, even further fracture,
beneath the already fractured surface of the third told of music that will
perhaps always resist a more complete understanding. The central ‘Andante ma
non troppo e molto cantabile’ heard no taming of its harmonies, its procedures
the more enigmatic the more one listened. And yet, it often remained
recognisably rooted in the eighteenth century: a paradox perhaps beyond even
dialectical understanding. It was a rarefied form of release, yet release
nonetheless, that we heard in the scherzo. Though marked ‘Presto’, I think it
was taken less hurriedly than the finale of the earlier quartet (‘Allegro molto’);
at any rate, the tempo seemed better suited both to work and to performance. A
sixth movement that seemed to reimagine aspects of the first, in still richer
yet no less rare tones, prepared the way for a strongly related finale, defiant
yet once more sweet-toned. As an encore, we heard a waltz composed by violinist
Duncan Grant for the wedding of two of his friends.
