Waterloo Festival (3) – Doric String Quartet: Schubert, Bartók, and Mozart, 8 June 2021

St John's, Waterloo

Schubert: Quartettsatz, D 703
Bartók: String Quartet no.3, Sz. 85
Mozart: String Quartet no.23 in F major, KV 590

Alex Redington, Ying Xue (violins)

Hélène Clément (viola)

John Myerscough (cello)

Images: Matthew Johnson

With such a programme, one might have been back at the Wigmore Hall. Indeed, many are already. It is a hallmark of Anthony Friend’s achievement in his Spotlight Chamber Concerts that all combinations of artists and programme I have heard might readily have taken place in London’s—many would say the world’s—finest chamber music venue. This evening was the turn of the Doric String Quartet, in Schubert, Bartók, and Mozart.


Schubert’s Quartettsatz is a popular recital-opener the world over. However many times one has heard it, it seems always to retain its allure and fascination. This was an unusual performance, unlike any I can recall, a frozen opening thawing somewhat, yet never to the extent of sounding what we might call ‘traditional’, let alone ‘Viennese’. If the tonal palette were somewhat restricted, there were great contrasts nonetheless to be heard within its selected constraints. There was much pent-up fury, so it seemed: a performance, perhaps, for our times. If I cannot imagine always wanting to hear Schubert like this, it was certainly preferable to lazy Gemütlichkeit.


Was that relative astringency in some sense preparation for Bartók? Not really, for it was quite rightly a very different world we entered with his Third Quartet: a different kind of ice, a different kind of febrility. Process stood more closely to the fore: doubtless a reflection of the work itself, but also of the performance. The palette here was broader, both in tone and dynamic contrasts. The players showed a keen collective—and individual—ear for detail and its place in the greater whole. If sometimes one felt on the brink of chaos, there was no doubt this was an organised chaos, drama lying in the shards of light, the cracks between notes, as much as in Bartók’s well-nigh Mozartian profusion of melody and, crucially, its relationship to harmony. Syncopation and other rhythmic devices propelled that drama, but never alone.

 

I often missed that relationship between melody and harmony and the consequent harmonic motion that creates dynamic form in the performance of Mozart’s late F major Quartet, KV 590. Clearly the Doric players hear Mozart differently from me, their favoured light, silvery, broadly ‘period’ tone—post-Harnoncourt, one might call it—very different from my ideal (or default). That, however, is no bad thing; one should always be prepared to examine and re-examine one’s preconceptions and prejudices. Their approach is in any case far from dogmatic: there was strikingly warmer playing from all concerned too. It was more what I heard sometimes as a strange lack of direction that puzzled. That said, there was much to admire in each movement: the first a model of conversational playing; the second swift yet intriguingly chaste, enigmatic, even introverted. The third offered splendid emotional intensification in its trio, whilst the fourth was full of incident in its almost helter-skelter progress. I never heard it smile, though. The lack, moreover, of an identifiable—to me—pulse had the music sound increasingly listless. For me, this was quixotic Mozart, but it drew me in to listen, above all in the intensity of passages taken sotto voce. It also had me think.

Doric Quartet - Haydn, 28 February 2018

Wigmore Hall

String Quartet in G major, op.64 no.4

String Quartet in D major, op.64 no.5, ‘Lark’

String Quartet in E-flat major, op.64 no.6

Alex Redington, Jonathan Stone (violins)

Hélène Clément (viola)

John Myerscough (cello)

I found this a perplexing yet fascinating concert: not the programme, straightforwardly the last three of Haydn’s twelve so-called ‘Tost’ quartets, but the performances. They brought home to me some of the differences between mere taste and judgement. There was much that I – and the friend who accompanied me still more – may not have liked about what was heard here, and that inevitably forms part of our judgement. It clearly should not form more than part of it, though, or criticism truly would be nothing more than consumerism, well or ill ‘informed’. For, by the same token, if often I found the general tone and playing style of the Doric Quartet here strangely inward yet tense, to an extreme that seemed distinctly odd for Haydn, I could not say that it was wrong, nor that many of the players’ other choices did not have justification of their own. I was compelled by these performances to listen, and indeed often to wonder anew at Haydn’s fabled inventiveness, even if many other performances have spoken more touchingly, more personally, even more enjoyably, to me.

There was nothing objectionable, or even unusual, to the playing I heard at the opening of the G major Quartet, op.64 no.4: stylish, cultivated, and clearly considered. The general tone may have been somewhat ‘period’, but it proved varied and never dogmatic. When vibrato was entirely withdrawn, it was for a discernible reason. There was, moreover, a strong sense of formal dynamism to the first movement as a whole. Those of Haydn’s figures with a resemblance to Mozart intrigued all the more on account of the decidedly non-Mozartian use to which they were put. There was a degree of relaxation to be heard in the minuet, still more so, indeed markedly so, in its trio. Again, nothing was taken for granted. Likewise in the Adagio, an austere yet serene song of considerable cumulative power, albeit worlds away from the Amadeus Quartet or the sound I hear in my head. It was worlds away too, I think, from, say, the Quatuor Mosaïques; this had a tension and relative astringency very much of its own. I did wonder, though, whether the players here and, still more so in the finale, might have played out a little more at times. The latter movement’s more extrovert moments told, but neither so clearly nor so joyfully as they might.

The ‘Lark’ Quartet, op.65 no.5, followed. I had heard this recently indeed, also at the Wigmore Hall, from the Jerusalem Quartet. That performance had certainly been more to my taste, and also, I think, more musically revealing (perhaps partly on account of taste). This performance, though, again had me listen and think. The first movement began in playful yet febrile fashion, once more deeply considered, and in many ways so it continued, even when less tonally ingratiating. The development section showed us how many ways there are to develop – well, a few of them anyway – even within a single, concise span such as this. And the return was experienced, by me at least, very much as a return. I have heard the music sound closer to Beethoven, not without benefit, but it need not always do so. The slow movement sounded a note of kinship to that in the preceding quartet, yet sang its own song, no one else’s. There was a splendid sense of involvement to the minuet, in particular to its marriage between harmony and counterpoint. However, sometimes the music seemed in danger of losing its pulse, its impetus. Whilst I can understand the temptation to play around, to linger, I am not sure that it ultimately worked to Haydn’s advantage. The finale was, again, curiously restrained, indeed still more so.

That I was taken by surprise by Haydn’s tonal plan in the first movement of the E-flat major Quartet, op.64 no.6, can only be a good thing. Again, I was made to listen, in a performance that perhaps laid greater emphasis upon counterpoint than harmony – but that is never the easiest of balances to ensure. The passion of the central episode to the slow movement was most welcome, indeed riveting. Its surrounding material was certainly contrasted, but was it perhaps a little too cool? Were the contrasts of the trios in the following movement again overdone? Perhaps. Again, much is surely a matter of taste. I certainly liked the boisterous quality to the minuet, though. The finale scampered along nicely, although there were times when I wished it might have been taken off the leash. Such, though, clearly was not the æsthetic of this particular performance, from which I learned much.

Doric String Quartet - Mozart, Janáček and Beethoven, 29 December 2009

Wigmore Hall

Mozart – String Quartet no.15 in D minor, KV 421
Janáček – String Quartet no.2, ‘Intimate Letters’
Beethoven – String Quartet no.7 in F major, op.59 no.1, ‘Razumovsky’

Alex Redlington, Jonathan Stone (violins)
Simon Tandree (viola)
John Myerscough (violoncello)

Mozart’s music, as many of us know from bitter experience, is the most difficult of all to perform well. At the best of times, when it formed part of a living, developing culture, there was nowhere to hide; nowadays, the influence of the ‘authenticke’ brigade is so strong, even amongst supposedly ‘modern’ performers, that Mozart performance has been rendered all but impossible. At least the Doric String Quartet did not travel far down that particular road. We were spared the attention-seeking antics of what I suppose at some point we shall have to call the ‘uncovered-gut-scraping community’, though the performance, as if cowed by Taliban-like ‘community leaders’, remained somewhat tentative. Today one has to be grateful for Mozart playing that is not metronomic and that permits vibrato, and there was more to praise than that. Contrapuntal clarity, especially during the first and third movements of the D minor quartet, was most welcome, with John Myerscough’s cello line perhaps unusually prominent – and welcomely so. For the most part, this, despite the minor mode, and Mozart’s avowedly demonic tonality, was more Apollonian than Dionysian Mozart. However, there were passages, for instance the recapitulation of the opening Allegro moderato, in which emotional reaches previously only hinted at were more fully explored. The slow movement was an Andante in the modern sense, that is, not really a slow movement, more of an intermezzo, though it had an undeniably brisk elegance to it. Following that, the intensity to the minuet from its opening bars was striking, whilst the trio exhibited a fine sense of the outdoors, bringing Salzburg serenades to my mind. Here, Alex Redlington’s first violin and Simon Tandree’s viola proved unfailingly melodic, whilst the pizzicato passages were equally well handled. The finale was cultivated, and sometimes looked forward to Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet; perhaps a little more in the way of Schubertian foreshadowing would have resulted in a more ominous rendition, but such was clearly not the intent. I very much liked Redlington’s sinuous way with Mozart’s chromatic passages, whilst the second variation, so understandably admired by Schoenberg, exhibited an emotional and textural intensity that yet remained firmly – perhaps a little too firmly? – within ‘Classical’ bounds.

Janáček’s second quartet experienced no such inhibitions; indeed, it received a very fine performance, fully at home with what can sometimes prove elusive idioms. The glassiness of Tandree’s early viola interventions was at one with the composer’s initial intention to employ the viola d’amore, whilst the passionate outbursts from elsewhere provided high drama, as if mindful of Janáček’s operatic output. The slow movement was equally impassioned, highly impressive in the way its fragmentary nature was built into something more; the defiant close was almost Bartókian. Consolation, though far from illusory, came in the third movement, with the first violin’s statement of the lullaby-like rocking theme. Emotional intensity mounted, before the turn to ‘terror’, of which the composer wrote to his muse, Kamila Stösslová. The finale sounded properly ecstatic. Once again, the players transmuted compositional discontinuities into a greater whole, responding equally well to the composer’s challenging quicksilver changes of mood.

The first movement of Beethoven’s op.59 no.1 quartet was a bit on the fast side, though the false exposition repeat was handled well. Indeed, structure was clear throughout. However, I felt this was all a bit too good-natured, lacking in Beethovenian grit and gruffness. The scherzo began in a similar vein, but ‘late Beethoven’ – despite the period of composition – discontinuities inspired a Janáček-like response, clearly drawing upon the experience of the previous work. There was not always quite the sense of inevitability one might have wished for, but there was clearly a straining towards it. Musical concerns, however, trumped the metaphysical, here and elsewhere, with the partial exception of the slow movement. For there, a response to the composer’s marking, mesto, registered with rapt intensity, not least in the leader’s sweetness of tone and Myerscough’s replies. The tempo sounded just right – which nowadays, of course, is a relief in itself. A few intonational slips could be heard, but nothing too serious. The fast finale, however, whilst often exciting, could sometimes trip over itself. There were estimable qualities, then, to this Beethoven, but the Janáček was the thing.