Wigmore Hall
Haydn: String Quartet in G minor, op.74 no.3, ‘Rider’
Clarice Assad: Nexus (London premiere)
Debussy: String Quartet in G minor, op.10
Edward Dusinberre, Harumi Rhodes (violins)
Contrary to some rumours I have seen spread, the Takács Quartet is not about to disband. Instead, at the end of this season, it will say goodbye to András Féjer, the last member of the founding group of players, after fifty-one years as its cellist. There was not the slightest sign of dimming powers at this Wigmore Hall concert; quite the contrary. At times, Féjer seemed almost to rise to first among equals, but then so, at other times, did his colleagues. Indeed, both programming and performance might have been designed to illustrate the many lives, within one greater life, of the string quartet as genre and the Takács Quartet in particular.
It always, of course, comes back to Haydn, here in the guise of his ‘Rider’ Quartet, op.74 no.3. The six opp. 71 and 74 quartets written in 1793 mark a watershed in the idea of quartet performance: the first the ‘father’ of, though not quite the first composer in, the genre composed with the idea of public performance at least partly in mind, as would be the case the following year on his second visit to London, in the Hanover Square Rooms (a very short walk away from the Wigmore Hall). There was no questioning the engagement of this concert audience—as, I suspect, there was not 232 years previously. The sense of musical character(s) increasingly formative and generative in Haydn’s parallel public-symphonic writing was vividly apparent in the Takács’s performance of the first and indeed subsequent movements here, a slightly tipsy, Jahreszeiten-presaging first violin part (Eduard Dusinberre the latest incarnation of the great Johann Peter Salomon) included. Féjer looked as well as sounded very much at home, though never too comfortable. Haydn’s latest play with sonata form proved every inch an intellectual challenge and joy. The slow movement sang and developed in gripping fashion, proto-Beethovenian – it is, of course, the other way around really – violin ‘ornamentation’ ornate, yes, but as fundamental to line as it would be in Bach, Beethoven, or Schoenberg. The concision marking the whole quartet was especially apparent in the minuet and trio, typically Classical play between tonic minor and major a microcosm of the Quartet as a whole. And the finale was all it should be, a thrilling ‘ride’ for the so-called ‘Rider’.
Debussy’s early String Quartet marks in
some ways a further step in the idea of public performance, in that it is very
clearly a concert work written by a composer with a deep appreciation for
string instruments but not a string player himself (which would have verged on
the incomprehensible to Haydn). Debussy was neither the first nor the last composer
in that category, but his Quartet is a characteristic work in that development,
all the more so if – I repeat ‘if’ – one takes on board Hans Keller’s typically
provocative claim that ‘you can come to understand a symphony by listening to
it, but you cannot completely understand a string quartet without playing it,’
the string quartet being ‘the esoteric symphony,’ with a ‘more absolute need
for … immediate experience’. One might say a string player rather than, say,
conductor or orchestral musician would say that, would he not, but let us leave
that (and Mandy Rice-Davies) alone for now.
Concision was again a hallmark of the performance, albeit naturally of a
different kind, just as its development was. (I do not find the word ‘cyclical’
very helpful here, though many do.) The rich, variegated tone we heard from the
outset was never present for its own sake, but as a means of expressing the
idea – even the Idea – of the work. Each movement’s form was unerringly communicated,
not as a formula, but as the revelation of its musical content in time. For
that, detail must be just as clear—and it was, as, for instance, in the thrilling
pizzicato of the second movement. The slow movement seemed to speak of the
ambiguities to come of Allemonde, on the threshold, as it were, of Pelléas
et Mélisande. You think this is malevolence; and surely it is. But is it? At
any rate, it moved into a rapturous fourth movement, with more than a little of
Tristan to it at times—as well, of course, as a reinvention of that G
minor/major tension heard in Haydn too. I honestly did not find the Quartet’s
conclusion any more convincing than I have before, but perhaps I am being too
German. For the rest, it was a wonderful performance I should readily have
heard again immediately.
Sadly, I could not say the same for the intervening work, Clarice Assad’s Nexus. There was no concision on display here, though I suspect it lasted for roughly the same time as the Haydn and Debussy works. Treated as a conceptual view of what might be involved in chamber music performance, as the ‘search for connection’ signalled in Dusinberre’s significantly more interesting spoken introduction, it offered something, I suppose. I imagine it took its place in this programme on that basis, but I am speculating. The problem was that its three movements, ‘(Dis)connection’, ‘Connection’, and ‘Synchronization’, came across as merely descriptive rather than analytical or exploratory. I gleaned nothing from them I should not have done from a string quartet with more interesting musical material. At best diffuse, the content was mostly gestural: walking on and off stage, stamping of feet, actorly expressions, acts of imitation, and so on. (There lay some mild interest in trying to guess which expressions were ‘natural’ and which were part of the work.) Playing was beyond compare; players seemed to be having fun; much of the audience seemed to be doing so too. If only the music ‘itself’ had not been more akin to a television soundtrack, vaguely modal, and relying on extraneous meta-activities for anything that might approaching interest.
