SECOND VIENNESE JOURNEY

Sara Wolstenholme and Christopher Murray, both of the Heath Quartet, talk to Toby Deller about their pre-pandemic recording of intense Second Viennese School quartets – music from another time and place, in more ways than one

There is a fair amount of looking back involved in the Heath Quartet’s latest album, not least because it is such a long time since it was made. ‘We did the recording in Stoller Hall at Chetham’s School in Manchester back in late 2019,’ recalls cellist Christopher Murray, joining me for a Zoom conversation along with Sara Wolstenholme, second violinist on the recording. ‘It’s a beautiful hall with a fantastic warm acoustic, so we were lucky to get that place. We were working with Jeremy Hayes, a producer we’ve worked with before on previous discs, so it was great to be back with him again. Sara and I were students at Chetham’s, so it was amazing to be back there. It brought back lots of memories.’

Indeed, it was in that city, at the Royal Northern College of Music, that the group started life in 2002. Other connections to the quartet’s Manchester origins were involved in the recording in the form of a few specially invited friends. ‘That’s always worked very well for us in the past, so it has that element of a live performance,’ explains Murray. ‘We didn’t have a huge crowd – Idon’t think we were allowed, for hire of the hall reasons – but we had a number of friends. My old cello teacher, Hannah Roberts, was there, and Douglas Jarman, who has written the programme notes for the album. He’s an expert on this period of music, and on Berg, so it was great to have him there. We know him from the Royal Northern, where he’s one of the academic professors.’

MARIJE JOHNSTON

‘THERE’S AN EXTRA DEPTH OF BREATHING THAT’S NECESSARY WHEN PLAYING WITH SINGERS’

The release features pieces by the three pioneers of the Second Viennese School: Webern’s Langsamer Satz (1905), Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet op.10 (1907–8) and Berg’s String Quartet op.3 (1910). All three works seem to be looking back towards late Romanticism even as their composers move towards a modern, atonal future. The double perspective is most explicit in the Schoenberg, with its setting of two poems by Stefan George that articulate a yearning for freedom from the burdensome past while relishing the oncoming ‘air of another planet’. The change of mood is expressed musically too, as the recognisably Romantic sound world of the opening turns into something more cosmic by the end.

The singer on the recording is Carolyn Sampson, a British soprano with whom the Heath has performed a number of times: the quintet gave the premiere of John Musto’s Another Place in 2015, for instance. They have also paired the Schoenberg in concert with Jörg Widmann’s similarly scored Fifth Quartet (Versuch über die Fuge), most recently in Barcelona.

‘The Schoenberg’s very interesting,’ says Wolstenholme, ‘because the harmony has completely dissolved for the later movements, and it’s so much about the timbral subtlety in that addition of the voice. It’s not about a powerhouse style all the time. I know it sounds trite, but there’s an extra depth of breathing that’s necessary when playing with singers, as when you play with wind players: you need so much flexibility, rhythmically – especially in the Schoenberg. And the way it’s written is quite complicated, so you really need to know everyone’s parts.’

Murray explains that the texts are an additional interpretative resource. ‘I’m interested in making it sound not like music – in being inspired by the sounds of nature, and also taking cues from the poetry that he’s used for the songs and thinking about how we can expand the palette. It’s fun to do that – Ifeel the same when I’m playing the sextet Verklärte Nacht, trying to make it sound like trees or birds or the wind or whatever. I think there’s quite a lot in Schoenberg that you can do with that. With the other pieces on the disc it’s perhaps a more singing, operatic sound world, so you spend more time in that kind of mode. But certainly in the Schoenberg there’s a rich seam of unusual sounds to find.’

Left–right Violinists Oliver Heath and Sara Wolstenholme, soprano Carolyn Sampson, violist Gary Pomeroy and cellist Christopher Murray at the sessions in Manchester

Adding to the challenge is the sheer expressive force of this repertoire. ‘Later music can be edgier in different ways,’ says Murray, ‘but in terms of expression, from a player’s perspective, you know that here you are going right to the edge of expressive power and engagement with the audience. It has that edge to it, even a century later.’ He emphasises the importance, therefore, of looking to vary the levels of intensity. ‘It can be easy to end up being cantabile all the time, which, in the end, doesn’t mean as much as it could do if you save it for the places where you really want to sing.’

‘YOU ARE GOING RIGHT TO THE EDGE OF EXPRESSIVE POWER’

That approach is to some extent implied by the musical writing. Webern, for instance, may be in a nostalgically lyrical frame of mind in Langsamer Satz but, suggests Murray, ‘He never stays in one mood or energy for long, even in this quite slow piece – that’s what the title means: “slow movement”. But it’s very mercurial, it’s always changing and it’s actually quite lively – though I’m not sure that’s the right word. The imagination is always moving on to the next thing; he never stays in one place for very long. And, of course, later on his pieces get shorter and shorter, don’t they? I remember reading somewhere: you can say what you like about Webern, but he never wastes anybody’s time! He gets on with it and he’s off. I think you can hear that in this piece.’

The same character is there in Berg’s two-movement quartet, too, explains Murray: ‘He keeps it moving so much, doesn’t he? There are so many changes in the music. It never stays still for very long, for more than a few bars at most, and then it will be accelerating, reaching another high point and then you’ll be starting again. It’s always changing, it’s always developing. I don’t think in that piece you get much opportunity for slogging, so to speak, but certainly the real climaxes are quite shattering. I remember one bit in the recording session where we were repeating again and again this absolutely explosive high point and I found myself thinking: God, this is extraordinary! What are we doing here, in this hall, with this cataclysmic moment that’s happening over and over again?’

Some time after recording was completed, the quartet’s founder first violinist, Oliver Heath, announced his departure from the group, making the album something of a memento of its first 20 years. Wolstenholme now shares the violin roles with Marije Johnston, who joined the quartet in 2021.

‘This was the last recording we did with Ollie,’ Wolstenholme reflects, confirming that they did not know this would be the case at the time, ‘and now we’ve moved on without him it’s really lovely that we have this disc, even though it’s coming out three years later and almost a year since he left. Whenever we rehearse for a concert we’re striving towards finding something together, and I guess doing a recording puts a magnifying glass on the process that we enjoy every day when we rehearse as a group. It’s an intensified version of that and it stays with you, that shared experience.’

WORKS Berg String Quartet op.3; Schoenberg String Quartet no.2 op.10; Webern Langsamer Satz

ARTISTS Heath Quartet, Carolyn Sampson (sop)

RECORDING VENUE Stoller Hall, Manchester

RECORDING DATES 11–13 December 2019

CATALOGUE NO. Signum Classics SIGCD 712

RELEASE DATE 1 July 2022