LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

Tim Homfray speaks to members of the Navarra Quartet, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year and recently welcomed two new players, about recording chamber works by Edward Gregson

The Navarra Quartet celebrates its 20th birthday this year. The players first got together as students at the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM) in Manchester and have gone on to have an illustrious career, taking in a clutch of competition wins and a Borletti-Buitoni Trust fellowship along the way.

Right at the start they were encouraged by the then principal of the RNCM, English composer Edward Gregson. ‘He was always very loyal to the quartets there,’ says the Navarra’s cellist, Brian O’Kane. Now the ensemble has repaid that support with a recording for Naxos of Gregson’s two string quartets and a selection of his other chamber music.

Gregson (b.1945) is a prolific composer (the brass world in particular has benefited greatly), but it was only in 2014 that he produced his first string quartet. He remembered the Navarra Quartet as an outstanding group, ‘so it seemed natural for me to want to write my first quartet especially for them’, he writes in his programme note; and he invited them to give the world premiere at the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, in January 2015. In 2017, as composer-inresidence at the Presteigne Festival, he produced his second work in the genre, which was premiered by the Nightingale Quartet.

SIMON MCCOMB

‘IT SEEMED NATURAL FOR ME TO WRITE MY FIRST QUARTET FOR THE NAVARRA’ –

The First Quartet has three movements, of which the first (marked Dramatically – Fast, with energy –Expressively) is variously dark and gritty (with intense counterpoint), light and melodic and intensely rhythmic. The central movement, ‘Fantasia on a Chorale’, looks back to the English string music of the 16th and 17th centuries and is alternately calm and dramatic, with touches of Bartók, before the vehement energy of the finale. The Second Quartet is a one-movement work, cast in five sections with sicilianas at the beginning and end, which moves through musically and emotionally complex landscapes.

The challenges presented by the two quartets are quite different, according to Bartosz Woroch, second violinist of the Navarra Quartet. ‘The first one is very structured, almost like a homage to the history of string quartet writing. It is quite strict, precise. It is clear what you have to do. The second is in a sort of fantasy form. I find it more challenging.

It is much shorter than the first one, but with the sheer size of its one movement you have to absorb much more information at once. There is also much more freedom. If you give freedom to four people you can get into trouble! You have a lot of decisions to make, whereas in the first quartet a lot of the decisions are made for you. The challenge is not so much technical as about interpretation.

But it’s very rewarding to play, once one gets over the hurdles.’

The Navarra has played the First Quartet several times since the premiere.O’Kane says that they’ve not played the second one at all in concert. A side benefit of learning repertoire for a recording, says O’Kane, ‘is that it is a nice way for a quartet to plan for the future. You record it and then you tour with it. We are certainly looking to play the Gregson quartets again, having put so much work into them.’

This being an all-Gregson CD, there are several other works here, most of which the players hadn’t seen before. One of them, the Triptych for solo violin, fell to the quartet’s leader Benjamin Marquise Gilmore. It’s a formidable piece, written as a test work for the 2011 RNCM Manchester International Violin Competition.

At the sessions in Upper Norwood, London, (from left) Bartosz Woroch, Benjamin Gilmore, Edward Gregson, Sasha Bota and Brian O’Kane

SESSION PHOTO COURTESY EDWARD GREGSON

The first movement, ‘A Dionysian Dialogue’, is a fiendish, double-stopped conversation between wild Dionysus and gentle Apollo, which Gilmore plays with suitably Olympian assurance. The central Liebeslied is a love song with variations and more tricksy double-stops, and the Moto perpetuo finale is an unashamedly virtuoso romp.

‘It would be challenging for any player,’ says Woroch, ‘but Ben enjoys those sorts of challenges. He makes it sound quite effortless.’ At the recording session, held last November at the church of St John the Evangelist in Upper Norwood, south London, Gilmore’s colleagues left him to it and went to lunch. ‘He was practising in the studio when we left, and when we came back the engineer said they were nearly done.Ben was extremely efficient.’

There are two further works on the disc, both recorded with players they hadn’t met before. Le jardin à Giverny is a wistful, elegiac work, originally written as Romance for clarinet and piano in 1964, when Gregson was still a student, and reworked 52 years later (in 2016) as a cor anglais and string quartet piece for Alison Teale, who gives a poised performance of it here. Alto saxophonist Rob Buckland joins the quartet for the congenial and melancholy Benedictus, which started life in 1988 as a treble solo in Gregson’s Missa brevis pacem.

The Navarra Quartet has had intensive relationships with composers before. One of the highlights of their first 20 years, says O’Kane, was the work the musicians did with Pēteris Vasks, whose three quartets they recorded for Challenge Classics (released 2010).

Joseph Phibbs and Manuel Hidalgo have dedicated works to them, and most recently, Simon Rowland-Jones has written them a flute quartet. They gave the premiere with flautist Adam Walker in March this year at their own Weesp Chamber Music Festival in Holland, of which they have been artistic directors since 2014.

The quartet has had several changes of personnel over its lifetime. Woroch and Gilmore joined within the last year, andO’Kane has been a member since 2012.

Inevitably, with new people there are new ways of working. ‘The dynamics within a string quartet are unique to those four people,’ says O’Kane, ‘so having two new people is very different. Especially as we had a married couple before!’ Covid-19 has had its effect as well. ‘A lot of groups have seen the result of the pandemic.

It’s often the case that groups do take a new direction as a result of something so monumental.

‘It’s not better or worse, just different and exciting. It’s wonderful to have a fresh new energy and direction in the quartet.’

WORKS Edward Gregson String Quartets nos.1 and 2; Benedictus; Le jardin à Giverny; Triptych ARTISTS Navarra Quartet, Alison Teale (cor anglais) Rob Buckland (alto saxophone)