CONCERTS

New York

Eighth Blackbird provides a twist to an evening of quartets

CHRIS LEE

BRENTANO QUARTET, PACIFICA QUARTET, AMERICAN STRING QUARTET, ANTON NEL (PIANO) EIGHTH BLACKBIRD, TELEGRAPH QUARTET, CHARLES NEIDICH (CLARINET) EMERSON QUARTET

THE TOWN HALL 8 OCTOBER 2021

For string quartet aficionados, this gala presented by the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation and The Town Hall was the sonic equivalent of a sugar rush. To mark the foundation’s 50th anniversary, the evening included not one but five string quartets, all of which were Naumburg winners over the years, and demonstrated the foundation’s long record of shepherding chamber music at the highest artistic level.

The Brentano Quartet began with Haydn’s F minor Quartet op.20 no.5, with keen focus and emphasis on the work’s muted mood. In contrast, the Pacifica Quartet unleashed the Allegro from Prokofiev’s String Quartet no.2. Insouciant pizzicatos combined with rhythmic punches, as the group playfully barrelled through the score. With the superb pianist Anton Nel, the American String Quartet offered the second and fourth movements of Brahms’s Piano Quintet in F minor. The Andante showed delectable delicacy, before the ensemble sprang to life in the gutsy, rhythmically precise finale.

After the interval, the Telegraph Quartet and clarinettist Charles Neidich glistened in the Larghetto from Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, followed by the final Allegretto con variazioni, packed with immaculate ornaments and trills, and each variation sharply characterised. Earlier this year, the Emerson Quartet announced that 2023 would mark their final appearances, so when they took the stage to close the evening, the audience applause seemed more fervent than usual. After moving their chairs closer together, the tighter formation seemed to underline the relentless power of Bartók’s Third Quartet, here packed with nervous energy and loneliness. As a non-quartet palate cleanser shortly before the end, Eighth Blackbird offered Tom Albert’s Thirteen Ways, VIII: Steady, Rhythmic (1997), and a riotous work by Holly Harrison, Lobster Tails and Turtle Soup (2016), which had the entire audience grinning.

BRUCE HODGES

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KRONOS QUARTET, SPECIAL MUSIC SCHOOL QUARTET, KODAK QUARTET

MERKIN CONCERT HALL 21 OCTOBER 2021

This programme featured music from the Kronos Quartet’s ‘Fifty for the Future’ project, an education and legacy project in which Kronos is commissioning – and distributing online for free – 50 new works from composers around the world. Charlton Singleton’s Testimony (2019) was powerfully performed by the Special Music School Quartet, opening the concert with a moving violin solo joined by the viola in octaves before transitioning into a jazzy, rhythmic section complete with stomping and clapping, reminiscent of a church camp meeting. Trey Spruance’s work Séraphîta (2016) followed, performed by the Kodak Quartet of the Cali School of Music from Montclair State University. The meditative opening of the first movement gave way to a percussive second movement which included ankle percussion and terrific rhythmic energy.

Kronos took the stage with the first of three world premieres of the evening: Peni Candra Rini’s Maduswara (2020), which included a backing track of forest sounds – crickets, bullfrogs, a rainstorm. Kronos’s ability to transport the audience into the rainforest so effectively with the track and a few well-played harmonics, ponticello, glissandos and pizzicato was extraordinary. Unpredictable rhythms were both jarring and strangely calming – like nature itself. Inti Figgis-Vizueta’s branching patterns (2021), another world premiere, included all manner of extended techniques; the Kronos found structure and simplicity within a cacophony of sound and complicated texture. Sky Macklay’s scalar and rhythmic work Vertebrae was clever and creative, and the Kronos played with familiarity and elegance.

The versatility of the Kronos players shone throughout the programme, but was perhaps the most evident in the final world premiere of the evening, Aruna Narayan’s Mishra Pilu (2020), in which they beautifully embodied classical Indian tradition. Their ability to inhabit completely different musical and cultural worlds within minutes of each other betrays the Quartet’s depth of study, musical and technical prowess, and devotion to a variety of musical cultures and styles. Next was a piece by the electronic producer Jlin, Little Black Book (2018), which took the listener yet again to an entirely different auditory world. Philip Glass’s Quartet Satz concluded the evening, and the Kronos invited on stage the two groups that had performed earlier as well as other students they had been working with in the preceding week. The ensemble created a cushion of sound, delicate and dazzling, and the group effort encapsulated what the Kronos wants to offer young quartets: a present invitation into music for the future.

LEAH HOLLINGSWORTH

The ever versatile Kronos Quartet

JAY BLAKESBERG

TAKÁCS QUARTET, GARRICK OHLSSON (PIANO)

92Y 23 OCTOBER 2021

The clean playing of the Takács Quartet brought clarity of line to an evening of Brahms at 92Y. While Brahms’s music is often known for its density, the Takács brought a certain simplicity to two of his works for strings and piano, in an almost straightforward – although not boring – performance with Garrick Ohlsson. The sweetness of Edward Dusinberre’s sound immediately invited the audience into the A major Piano Quartet op.26.

This was the first time I heard the quartet’s new violist Richard O’Neill, and while his playing was characterful and vibrant, he brought a different energy to the group: at times his brighter sound stuck out a little, as did his dramatic physical gestures. His eagerness felt almost self-conscious, or perhaps soloistic, and at times was even distracting. Nonetheless, his articulations were perfectly matched (and quite striking in the Scherzo of the Quintet in the second half ) and he did contribute a vibrancy to the group that balanced out the somewhat mechanical piano playing of Ohlsson. The Finale of the Piano Quartet had terrific energy and beautiful transitions, and a most exciting ending.

The string playing of the Brahms F minor Piano Quintet op.34 was often quite breathtaking. The Andante opened with terrific sensitivity and transitioned into a highly romantic interpretation complete with slides on the shifts and wide vibrato. The final movement boasted elegant playing from cellist András Fejér and the Quartet never lost the quality of sound or clarity of line despite an explosive ending.

LEAH HOLLINGSWORTH

JERUSALEM QUARTET, AMANDA FORSYTH (CELLO)

92Y 6 NOVEMBER 2021

Hearing a concert in this room for the first time in several years reminded me of how tricky its acoustics are. Just a few feet in placement on stage can produce a wholly different effect on both the players and the audience. The Jerusalem Quartet is celebrating its 25th season this year. Unfortunately, the aforementioned stage acoustics dimmed one’s pleasure in hearing them in person for the first time.

Leader Alexander Pavlovsky seemed to have difficulty with the focus of his sound, and the opening measures of Haydn’s Quartet in F minor op.20 no.5 had some tentative moments before the ensemble coalesced. Even then, Pavlovsky and second violin Sergei Bresler were frequently less than perfectly attuned in both pitch and ensemble. Violist Ori Kam and cellist Kyril Zlotnikov produced plentiful low-register sonority which anchored the ensemble nicely. The fugal finale of the opening Haydn led to the innocent-sounding opening measures for violin and cello of Shostakovich’s Seventh, and shortest, String Quartet, composed in early 1960 in memory of his first wife. The opening material returns at the end of its three short attacca movements, the essence of each the players projected unerringly in what was the musical high point of the evening.

Joined by Amanda Forsyth in the first cello chair, the programme ended with Schubert’s glorious Quintet in C major D956. Despite much beautiful playing, including the expressive sound of Forsyth’s 1699 cello by Carlo Giuseppe Testore, it too often seemed unsettlingly rushed, especially the Adagio.

DENNIS ROONEY

London

NICOLAS ALTSTAEDT (CELLO) LONDON PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA/ EDWARD GARDNER

ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL 1 OCTOBER 2021

Though the Cello Concerto of Lutosławski is now over half a century old, and the most modernist work in the genre to claim a toehold on the repertoire, its reception still tends to be dominated by the explicitly political mode of performance promoted by its dedicatee Rostropovich. Nicolas Altstaedt demonstrated what the concerto’s exhilarating adventure might offer once liberated from a straightforward ‘one against many’ narrative.

There’s nothing in the concerto rulebook about writing the soloist’s cadenza as the opening chapter, for example, but Altstaedt seized the opportunity to draw a wry, paradoxical sketch – true to the composer’s marking of ‘indifférent’ – of a protagonist inclined to contemplation and only reluctantly drawn into banter and conflict. Edward Gardner handled the obstreperous trumpets, aleatoric interventions and Bartókian moonlit textures with a light touch while giving Altstaedt space to lead the argument.

The central Cantilena took on striking significance as an Orphic taming of the furies, articulated as a lyrical arch of melody and infused with the passion that outstanding accounts of modernist masterpieces find bubbling under their reflective surfaces. Altstaedt’s flair and high-wire athleticism carried all before him in the Finale: the denouement arrived almost as a relief, like the bad end to a black comedy rather than a tragedy, and without the solipsistic collapse of more conventionally ‘heroic’ interpretations.

PETER QUANTRILL

PEKKA KUUSISTO (VIOLIN) PHILHARMONIA ORCHESTRA/SANTTU-MATIAS ROUVALI

ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL 3 OCTOBER 2021

New violin concertos continue to arrive thick and fast, few of them faster than the piece commissioned for Pekka Kuusisto from the American composer– songwriter Bryce Dessner. Ostinato patterns and cross-string riffs kicked in, and hardly let up through the course of a continuous, three-movement span. Kuusisto barely put down his bow. The notes for the soloist alone must run into the thousands, let alone the endlessly swirling, juddering orchestral texture.

A folk-like melody briefly emerged, then a snowline cantilena, both just as swiftly buried by the onward landslide of semiquavers. Dessner’s avowed inspiration sprang from an Anne Carson tale of the pilgrimage route through France and Spain to Santiago de Compostela, and more saliently from the Finnish violinist’s artistry, his energy as a performer and his assimilation of styles within and beyond the classical sphere.

An entrancing Pekka Kuusisto with the Philharmonia

MARK ALLAN

Boris Giltburg joins the Pavel Haas Quartet in muscular Brahms

COURTESY WIGMORE HALL

A cadenza from Kuusisto introduced not so much a slow as a quiet movement. A tantalisingly brief recitativo break elicited a measure of lyric dialogue between soloist and orchestra. Then the ostinatos locked into place once more and the concerto pushed ever onwards towards one final, wide-open harmonic vista. I found greater violinistic imagination in Kuusisto’s entrancing two-minute encore of a traditional Finnish tune than in the entire 27-minute concerto.

PETER QUANTRILL

ANTOINE TAMESTIT (VIOLA) LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA/ROBIN TICCIATI

LSO ST LUKE’S 14 OCTOBER 2021

The LSO has done a fair number of concerts at St Luke’s recently, mostly to be televised with or without an audience. The hall is set up for video recording, with the orchestra facing away from the seating. So for this concert, violist Antoine Tamestit played to us across an orchestra facing the wrong way, with all the concomitant problems of balance this occasionally caused.

Robin Ticciati set a broad speed at the outset of Walton’s Viola Concerto, and Tamestit produced a nicely languid opening paragraph, with some leisurely musing in 6ths to come, redolent of sunny afternoons in Walton’s beloved Italy. He was robust in the semiquaver passagework, but still in danger of disappearing beneath the orchestra, and although he set up the recapitulation beautifully with his double-stops, the following passage was rather lost below the wind solos.

In the second-movement Vivo he produced great passages of gathering momentum and rhythmic snap, as well as some tremendous fruity playing on the C string. There was a sense of humour underpinning the Finale, which danced before relaxing into the warmth of the central melody and ended in silky sotto voce. In Brahms’s Fourth Symphony the LSO was magisterial, with lush strings and wind playing.

TIM HOMFRAY

PAVEL HAAS QUARTET, PAVEL NIKL (VIOLA) BORIS GILTBURG (PIANO)

WIGMORE HALL 19 OCTOBER 2021

There were two Brahms quintets in this concert: the first for strings, for which the Pavel Haas Quartet was joined by viola player Pavel Nikl, and the second his Piano Quintet with pianist Boris Giltburg. Both were imbued with the quartet’s trademark sheer joy, epitomised at the opening of the G major Quintet op.111, with the exhilaration and energy that cellist Peter Jarůšek brought to the vaulting opening theme.

The first movement was both pacy and spacious, the textures clear and allowing for myriad fine details. Violist Luosha Fang’s melody at the gentle outset of the Adagio had luscious depth of tone, and the Un poco Allegretto third movement had a constant dynamic ebb and flow, with some silky playing at its heart. The finale, essentially lyrical, had some fine punchy syncopations and outbursts of earthy dance.

The first movement of the F minor Piano Quintet op.34 was muscular and urgent, with a quantity of nervous energy offset by gently floated melody. In the second-movement Andante, there was a sense of mystery and discovery, and the following Scherzo was clipped and fierce, driving onward but always tonally focused. The Finale caught all of Brahms’s many voices and wove them into a superb dramatic whole.

TIM HOMFRAY