One went to this concert with a degree of apprehension. The last concert in the Lunchtime Series had had to be abandoned shortly after it had started owing to a medical emergency which had obviously shocked all who were there. One wondered whether this might have a knock-on effect. Above all else it left one wondering what had been the outcome for the poor person who had collapsed.
The last question was happily answered. Not only had the concertgoer recovered but was also fit enough to attend this concert. In regards the other issue ,compared to the rather sparse audience for the curtailed concert, this one filled the gallery to the point where programmes were unobtainable for the last to arrive.
Why this should have been is obviously open to question. For instance, the previous concert had coincided with half term in most places whereas for this one the natural order of things had been re-established. However, also the New Walk Museum audience knows its onions, and the excitement was palpable at the prospect of hearing the Piatti Quartet for the first time in Leicester and in a programme that reflected the immutable fact that the string quartet form has produced over the centuries probably more copper-bottomed masterpieces than anything else in the chamber music repertoire. In addition, and as importantly, this is heard in a venue which musicians consistently say is as fine an acoustic for string sound as any in the country.
I was particularly excited by the prospect of a live performance of Elgar’s String Quartet. To digress for a moment, when my late wife and I came to Leicester in 1971, we had encountered little chamber music; in London we had spent our shekels on opera and symphony concerts. Those were rather thin on the ground in Leicester and we gradually became aware of how much wonderful chamber music there was when we started to go to the regular concerts given by the then relatively new Lindsay Quartet.
However, there remained holes in our experience for some time as I found out on an evening in the 1980s in Cambridge, when after a day of marking exam papers, I stumbled on a concert in a college given over to a reading of correspondence between Elgar and his wife in the brief period they lived in Sussex after the Great War. This was to be their last two years together and the last flowering of Elgar’s genius, though it took a long time for these works to be recognised in those kind of terms. That evening was musically centred around the Piano Quintet, excerpts during the readings to be followed by a complete performance.
Well, I was simply bowled over. I had recently heard the Schumann Quintet and for the life of me I could not see the Elgar as in any way inferior and that remains absolutely true for me to this day. The Quartet and the Violin Sonata on the other hand I felt rather more problematic in places and I was eager to find out on this occasion whether that was still the case.
One thing which was certain in this performance from the very first note was that the Piatti Quartet are a force in the land. They have a richness of sound coupled with what seemed a huge range of dynamics. The passages in the outer movements which can sound rather repetitive as if the composer is occasionally treading water here were played with a flexibility and subtle differentiation which found an evolving continuity particularly in the last movement which hitherto I had not grasped. Mind you that movement has a hard act to follow, what to my mind is one of the most tender and lovely pieces of music ever written and which has become ever more so for me in recent years knowing that the composer’s wife, who beautifully described this movement as ‘a captured sunshine’, had only a year or so to live. A memorable performance.
It was followed by a short work premiered at this year’s Three Choirs Festival entitled Iorsa referring to a loch on Arran. It was a short piece full of reference to the Gaelic world. I didn’t detect on first hearing any particularly individual voice but it was a beautifully crafted piece of music that within its modest aim made one listen with considerable pleasure.
The concert finished with a performance of Smetana’s Quartet No.1. Its opening with the viola to the fore led to another reminiscence. The founder of the Festival Graham Oppenheimer not infrequently moaned to me about his instrument being the Cinderella of the strings and the butt of innumerable jokes. Well, I wonder whether that is still so. We have in recent years heard a number of virtuosi of the viola and in this performance we heard another one.
It has been noticeable how over the decades the preferred seating for more quartets has been to have the cello in the middle and the viola directly opposite to the first violin. Here it really paid off with the viola launching the work with astonishing richness, power and vitality, a quality maintained throughout the quartet’s playing of the work. The ebullience of the piece was all there, underpinned as is much Czech music by the spirit of the dance. There was that wonderful freshness so characteristic of music from that part of the world and so appealing to the British ever since Dvorak’s visits in the late 19c., though in this case, of course, the work finishes by chillingly portraying the composer’s awful awareness of his increasing deafness.
Overall, I thought this concert a tremendous hour and 10 minutes of music making. One certainly hopes that we shall hear these players again before too long.
The Diary of a Leicester Concert-goer 