SEEN AND HEARD UK CONCERT REVIEW with thanks to Music Web International
Accomplishment and Promise from The Benyounes Quartet
February 5, 2012
Haydn, String Quartet in F major, Op.77, No.2, Hob. III:82
Brahms, String Quartet in A minor, Op.51, No.2
I had heard and read much praise of the Benyounes Quartet, as one of the finest and most promising of young British string quartets, but hadn’t had the opportunity to hear them until I was able to attend concerts by them on successive days. On the evening of Saturday 4th February the Benyounes played in Swansea, as part of the series of concerts arranged by Crwth (see http://www.crwth.org.uk/), when their programme consisted of the two quartets above, plus the Debussy Quartet. The next morning they gave the concert detailed above as part of the monthly series of chamber concerts organised by Cwpanaur (see http://www.cwpanaur.co.uk)
Hearing both concerts left me feeling that the praise of the Benyounes Quartet that I had previously met was wholly justified. Here is a young ensemble (and they can’t really be quite as young as they all look, surely?) with a marvellous unity of approach, a sureness of intonation, a discipline and a spirit, an all-pervading sense of musicality, that makes them highly listenable already and surely promises even more in the future.
Their Haydn playing was quite outstanding. This quartet, perhaps Haydn’s greatest instrumental composition, was the last that Haydn completed and is a kind of supreme ‘test piece’ (though, of course, musically it is much more than just that) for any quartet. And the Benyounes Quartet certainly passed the test.
They brought a comfortable assurance to Haydn’s lucid development of his thematic materials, and there was a balance of grace and substance that caught the spirit of the work well-nigh perfectly; their playing breathed that air of naturalness and ease which is, of course, the fruit of much hard work. The Benyounes responded both to the infectious inventiveness of the writing and the underlying weight of thought: a delight from beginning to end, full of that light seriousness / serious lightness which is so characteristic of the best of Haydn.
The greater darkness of Brahms’ second quartet proved a greater challenge, though not one entirely that defeated the Benyounes – not by any means. There is an emotional gravity, a degree of real melancholy and pathos, in parts of this quartet, to which these players will give even fuller expression, I suspect, in later years: even if there is room yet for the Benyounes reading of Brahms to mature further, this was already a performance that many more experienced quartets would struggle to match, intelligent, purposeful and articulate.
I look forward to future opportunities to hear the Benyounes Quartet again. Already very accomplished, it will surely be very rewarding to follow their future development.
Glyn Pursglove
The Cavaleri Quartet Make More of Janáček Than Mozart
November 23, 2011
Mozart, Janáček: Caveleri StringQuartet: Anna Harpham, Ciaram McCabe (violins), Ann Beilby (viola), Rowena Calvert (cello). Reardon Smith Theatre, National Museum, Cardiff 20.11.11 (GPu)
Mozart: String Quartet in B flat, K.589
Janáček: String Quartet No.2 (Intimate Letters)
There is an abundance of good young British quartets at present – the Elias, the Carducci, the Barbirolli – to name but a few. How many of them will survive in the medium- to long-term is anyone’s guess. The sheer number of such quartets competing for what will, in the present economic climate, surely be a declining number of bookings, seems likely to ensure that for economic reasons alone many of these quartets will, sadly, probably not survive. (Leaving aside all the other thousand natural shocks that a string quartet is heir to). The Cavaleri Quartet, who made their Purcell Room debut in 2008 and first played at the Wigmore Hall in 2010, clearly has some qualities that ought to make it one of the candidates for survival.
In this particular recital they were heard at their best in their performance of Janáček’s second quartet, which they played with a full proportion of passionate intensity, coupled with strict adherence to matters of technical and ensemble discipline. The expressionist contrasts of Janáček’s music were very well articulated, the violence of the emotional contrasts, the sense of inner conflict. When the playing of the quartet was at its most perfectly integrated – as in the adagio second movement – the illusion was successfully created that the four instruments were embodiments of the contrary impulses, judgements and emotions of Janáček’s conflicted self. One heard the interplay of line and the shifting instrumental textures as enactments of a powerful psycho-drama. In the opening andante the competing idioms were very effectively distinguished and the technical demands were met with real assurance and certainty, without any less of expressive momentum. In the moderato third movement, there was much to admire and enjoy; fierce accents were placed with a precision that was never merely pedantic or precise for precision’s sake but which, again, communicated the startling, even disturbing, emotional honesty of the music. Both the driven energy of some parts of the movement and the passages of quiet intimacy (so often in close proximity to one another) were given their full weight and the relationship between them was always clear and persuasive. The opening pages of the final allegro were invested with an almost manic quality of the dance, the later parts of the movement balancing a sense both of the music’s illusion of near-abandonment and of Janáček’s absolute self-awareness and control. This was a compelling reading of a challenging quartet, a reading which gripped the listener from beginning to (emotionally exhausted) end.
The Mozart which preceded the Janáček was rather less satisfying, unfortunately. K. 589 is one of the quartets Mozart wrote in response to a commission from Friedrich Wilhelm II, King of Prussia and which, for ‘tactical’ reasons contained a particularly prominent part for the cello – the King’s instrument. The Cavaleri’s cellist, Rowena Calvert, did all that the music asked of her; her playing, in particular, of the opening melody of the second movement was especially beautiful. But the quartet as a whole didn’t really find and sustain a plausibly Mozartean idiom. While one doesn’t want to go back to the days of ‘porcelain’ Mozart and doesn’t want to overlook the emotional range and power of mature Mozart (and this, like the Janáček quartet is a late work), yet a performance that had as many jagged edges as this one did necessarily fails to capture the particular grace of Mozart’s music – that grace which co-exists with the expressiveness. For all the well-judged balance of ensemble sound, one missed a real responsiveness to the wit of the third movement (which was a bit on the ponderous side). The closing allegro assai was the most persuasive of the four movements, where there was a more idiomatic vivacity and where the weight of sound was varied with greater meaning and judgement than in the opening movements. Here, too, there was a clearer enunciation of Mozartean line and phrase. There were, that is to say, good things in the Mozart, but there were also things that were somewhat disappointing. The performance of the Intimate Letters was altogether more sure-footed, altogether the product of a more absolute certainty of idiom and mutuality of purpose. It was here that the Cavaleri Quartet most forcefully put its musical case for survival.
Glyn Pursglove
Haydn, Beethoven: Navarra Quartet: Magnus Johnston, Marije Ploemacher (violins), Simone van der Giessen (viola), Nathaniel Boyd (cello). Reardon Smith Theatre, National Museum, Cardiff 23.1.2011 (GPu)
Haydn, String Quartet in C, Op.54, No.2
Beethoven, String Quartet in E minor, Op.59, No.2
As has often been noted, Haydn’s opus 54 quartets have about them what was then a new assertiveness, a new demonstrativeness and even flamboyance of manner. This is certainly true of the second of the three quartets that carry the Opus 54 number, the most often played of the three. There is much that is bold in the writing and some of it makes considerable demands on the players’ virtuosity, in music where the first violin often plays a somewhat dominant role. In this performance by the young Navarra Quartet – formed in 2002 at the Royal Northern College of Music and currently Quartet in Association there – there was plenty of energy and propulsive playing. In the opening vivace the work of leader Magnus Johnston was strong, and the ensemble playing was well knit-together, though at moments things felt just a little rushed and in need of a little more space; certainly some of Haydn’s pauses might have been given greater value. Johnston was naturally much to the fore in the C minor adagio, playing the lamenting Ziguener over the hymn-like ground provided by the other voices. By leading straight from this adagio into the minuet, a minuet suggestive of both the ländler and the later waltz, Haydn (not uncharacteristically) teases the listener’s formal expectations, especially when the adagietto echoes the adagio as well as the minuet proper. This is tricky stuff and I am not sure that the Navarra absolutely brought it off on this occasion. Haydn continues to flout mere convention, closing with an enigmatic movement which opens with a simple and calm adagio (in which the cello of Nathaniel Boyd was heard to particularly good effect), before a lively presto enters assertively and appears to have taken over, to have established the movement as the kind of fast movement properly fitted to close a quartet; a fortissimo chord feels as though it is announcing the beginning of a forceful coda, only for the slow opening of the movement to return and for the work to close with a touching delicacy. The Navarra’s account of this movement was intelligent and measured, though a little of its magic eluded them.
In the second of Beethoven’s three Razumovsky quartets the playing was committed and energetic, though sometimes at the cost of detail. The opening of the allegro, with its two widely spaced chords, carried appropriate authority, but in the many rapidly shifting moods that occupy so much of the movement, transitions and emotional contrasts were not delineated quite as clearly as they might have been. The lengthy adagio was well focussed and shaped and the movement’s progression from an initial innocence and unearthly calm, through a suggestion of the heroic, to a degree of sorrow before closing in what Cobbett, capturing the emotional ambiguity very well, called “a tranquillity which is not that of joy” was well articulated. The Navarra Quartet was at its best in the compelling interpretation of this difficult movement. The opening of the allegretto was nicely pointed, though in the main scherzo-body of the movement their playing sometimes seemed too busily forceful to allow the music’s deep sense of unrest to find expression. The high-spirits of the closing presto were generally well-handled and a pleasantly jaunty manner was achieved and sustained, though this performance didn’t quite have the headlong irresistibility that some quartets have found in the movement.
The Navarra Quartet is already a good ensemble, and this was a concert at which one was very happy to have been present. The two quartets they chose to play on this occasion are both particularly complex and demanding, full of teasing subtleties and subversions of the conventional; I suspect that in a few year’s time the Navarra’s readings of these quartets will be better still – something to look forward to on the evidence of the good things they are already able to offer.
Glyn Pursglove
Reproduced courtesy of The Guardian
Llŷr Williams – review
Reardon Smith Lecture Hall, Cardiff
Rian Evans
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 15 December 2010
2010 has been a Beethoven year for Llyˆr Williams. Having just completed the sonata cycle at his Perth Concert Hall series, he returned to Cardiff for this performance of the last great triptych, formed by Op 109, 110 and 111. At 34, he is still relatively young to have reached this apogee in a pianist's career, yet his commanding technique, cool grasp of the vast intellectual span of the music and sense of wisdom beyond his years make for a stunning combination. Achieving a performance that seems to take music into another orbit altogether is to realise exactly what late Beethoven does, fearlessly transcending the safe and expected.
His playing of the Sonata in E major, Op 109, captured the work's balance of innocence and overwhelming power, all tightly controlled; a tiny smudge was almost reassuring, proof that Williams is indeed human. Here, and again in Op 110 in A flat major, every note was so poised as to rivet the attention: legato lines lovingly delineated, with passagework and massive chords despatched so as to emphasise the shock element of Beethoven.
If there is a criticism, it is not of the pianist but of the instrument, past its prime and simply not offering the range of expressive colour high in the treble to match the explosive depth of the bass. It was most noticeable in the final sonata, Op 111 in C minor. Nevertheless, Williams was able to build a huge structural edifice with unerring instinct. Knowing that his approach to the music will further mature over time, one can only marvel at this extraordinary artist.
SEEN AND HEARD UK CONCERT REVIEW: with thanks to MusicWeb International
Beethoven: Llŷr Williams (piano), Reardon Smith Theatre, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, 12.12.2010 (GPu)
Beethoven, Piano Sonata in E, Opus 109
Beethoven, Piano Sonata in A Flat, Opus 110
Beethoven, Piano Sonata in C Minor, Opus 111
This was an engrossing, almost wholly satisfying recital, a fascinating and rewarding traversal of notoriously challenging music, played with intensity and intellectual clarity. A few years ago the playing of Llŷr Williams was sometimes a little stiff and unyielding but now, in his mid-thirties, his work has great authenticity and certainty of purpose allied to a flexible responsiveness that generally makes for compelling performances.
The last three of Beethoven’s piano sonatas have often been played together in recital or recorded as a set. It is not hard to see why. The similarities and differences that they share invite analysis and reflection; they were written in quick succession (especially considering the enormous personal difficulties and the other compositional commitments Beethoven had in this last decade of his life) and there is a kind of resulting singleness of trajectory very discernable when they are heard together. They all have about them an air of ‘lastness’. Whether or not Beethoven knew that they were to be his last works in a genre which he had done so much to take beyond the exemplars provided by Haydn and Mozart is not really the point; what matters and what is certain is that they are the work of a composer fully conscious of all that he had already achieved in the form, that they were written out of a sensibility in part formed by that preceding achievement and conditioned by that weight of personal musical history. In Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus the narrator reports that the fictional Wendell Kretschmar said of the last sonata, the two-movement Opus 111 that “the sonata had come in the second, enormous movement, to an end, an end without any return”. And when he said ‘the sonata,’ he meant not only this one in C minor, but the sonata in general, as a species, as traditional art-form; it itself was here at an end, brought to its end, it had fulfilled its destiny, reached its goal, beyond which there was no going, it cancelled and resolved itself, it took leave – the gesture of farewell of the D G G motif, consoled by the C sharp, was a leave-taking in this sense too, great as the whole piece itself, the farewell of the sonata form”. One needn’t go quite as far as the hyperbolic Kretschmar while still feeling the sense, very strongly, that these three sonatas constitute an enormous act of closure, a summation of all that had gone before in the tradition of the piano sonata and a profound challenge to anyone and anything that might try to come afterwards.
In the opening of Opus 109 Beethoven unmistakeably remembers the origins of the piano sonata tradition, with reminiscences of Haydn; its lightness and grace might also have been heard (perhaps by Beethoven himself?) as a startling contrast with Opus 106 (the Hammerklavier) its predecessor in the sequence of Beethoven’s sonatas. One of my few slight reservations about Williams’s performance of these three astonishing sonatas was a feeling that he didn’t quite do justice to the (seemingly) artless grace of the opening vivace of the first movement or discover an underlying coherence in the transition to the adagio expressivo that follows, and the ensuing alternation of tempi and motif. The brief prestissimo second movement, however, which balanced energy and anxiety in a thoroughly convincing and engaging fashion carried absolute conviction. In the theme and six variations which constitute this unconventional sonata’s final movement, Williams’s playing had a structural clarity that established patterns of continuity and difference with glorious certainty. I have felt before now that Williams has often been at his very considerable best in sets of variations and this was sense was certainly confirmed here (and so was a sense of excited expectation at the thought of the coming second movement of Opus 111).
The first movement of Opus 110 displays even more obvious affinities with Viennese classicism than those to be heard at the opening of Opus 109. The sense of scale in Williams’s playing was perfectly judged in the first movement, full of spiritual possibility, quite without excessive grandeur and yet making it clear that this was music which, for all its roots in Haydn (there are borrowings from Haydn’s Symphony No.88), was leading us into territories that that great master would not have thought to enter. The brief middle movement was full of boisterous energy which, in its early stages at any rate, had a sense of rough fun, before one began to feel that this was energy was an almost desperate attempt to escape the deeper waters more than hinted at by music’s quieter moments. The remarkable final movement got the kind of performance it deserves – its opening played with a sense of space which brought poignancy to the adagio’s aria-like patterns, a poignancy at times becoming almost morbid, but never quite doing so. The fugal material was presented with inviting fluency, in which lines were etched with sharp clarity; the formally unexpected return of the adagio theme was beautifully integrated and the extraordinary ten repeated chords which herald the closing phase of the movement had about them an irresistible authority, an accumulating and growing power which made of them a summons which no audience could have resisted, before the movement built towards a radiant affirmation. Williams had delineated the sonata’s complex emotional transitions with an absorbed intensity which always allowed the listener in.
The two movements of Opus 111 were written, it seems, very rapidly. Here Beethoven’s subversion of the orthodoxies of the genre is absolute. Its two movements (and could even Beethoven really have successfully realised an appropriate third?) are a musical diptych built on simple, but profound antitheses. The first relentlessly fast; the second slow and at moments seemingly without movement; the first in C minor the second in C major. Though such metaphorical verbalisations are, of course, always inadequate it is hard to resist the temptation to think, as one listens, in terms of other perennial antithetical patterns: struggle and serenity; fury and tranquillity; storm and calm; light and dark; earthly and spiritual; even war and peace. Listening to Llŷr Williams’s superb performance of this magnificent sonata, I found myself thinking in terms of confinement and release, imprisonment and liberty. In the first movement the thunderous bass notes, the dark and heavily emphasised chords, the densely contrapuntal writing were all articulated with a full weight of sound and emotion, a sense both of the sombreness of life and the confinements of bewilderment, pain and uncertainty; one heard in the music a profundity both intellectual and, as it were, spatial, a sense of being locked away from light and possibility, only relieved in the closing bars in a dying away into silence which Williams held poised as a hint, rather than an assurance of release. The serenity with which the second movement retained its power to startle, after what had preceded it – even if one ‘knew’ it was coming, a tribute to the absorption Williams created in the hearer’s mind. The serenity, and the implicit nobility were mixed with a certain hesitancy, like survivors of turmoil, or released prisoners, finding themselves and the world before them once again. Though whether that world is our own or another is impossible to say. Certainly there are moments of unearthly beauty in the four variations at the heart of the movement (and one’s high expectations of how good Williams might be in this movement were fully realised). The fourth variation in particular, was remarkable. Williams did something approaching justice (perhaps no one performance can ever do this music full justice, it is as ‘unperformable’ as Charles Lamb thought King Lear which, of course, makes it all the more necessary that it should be performed) to the movement’s transcendental sublimity, to the astonishing way in which its final bars seem to evaporate rather than end.
Llŷr Williams doesn’t have the manner or the personality that might lend themselves easily to the publicity machine; it seems unlikely that he will ever quite become a ‘star’ in the way that term gets used nowadays about musicians. But, as a musician pure and simple, he compares well with many of those who have bigger ‘names’ than he does. Hopefully all who heard this recital went away with Beethoven at the front of their minds; that, after all, is how it should be. But later reflection would also surely have left them in no doubt as to the considerable merit, the penetrating intelligence and authority, of the pianist they had heard.
Glyn Pursglove
Haydn, Borodin: Edinburgh String Quartet: Tristan Gurney, Philip Burrin (violins), Michael Beeston (viola), Mark Bailey (cello). Reardon Smith Theatre, National Museum, Cardiff 21.11.10 (GPu)
Haydn: String Quartet in G minor, Op.74, No.3Borodin: String Quartet No.2 in D
The valuable series of Sunday morning chamber concerts, organised by CwpanAur and the National Museum of Wales, continued its 2010-11 series with a visit from the Edinburgh String Quartet, founded as long ago as 1959 and now one of Britain’s longest-lived quartets – and one of those in which would-be listeners can invest confident expectations of, at the very least, highly competent performances and intelligent interpretations and, very often, much more than just that.
The programme they chose to play in Cardiff was the proverbial concert of two halves, most obviously insofar as a Classical half was followed by a Romantic half. No doubt I give away my own prejudices (and/or my limitations) if I say that for this listener at least, it was also a concert made up of a major and minor work (I am not here referring to key signatures!). A quartet programme that couples mature Haydn with a work by another composer always, it seems to me, to be taking a risk. Haydn’s sheer mastery of ‘his’ form is such that many of his successors have some of their limitations exposed when one of their quartets is directly juxtaposed with one of his. My own feeling was that something of the kind happened on this particular occasion.
Haydn’s String Quartet in G minor, Op 74, No 3 is sometimes referred to as the ‘Rittquartet’ (the Rider Quartet) from the prancing rhythm to be heard in both first and last movements. In common with some of the other Opus 74 Quartets, there is a more demonstrative, public quality to the writing than had hitherto characterised most of Haydn’s quartets, the musical gestures are bigger, the contrasts more marked. The listener’s attention was certainly grabbed at once by the forceful precision with which the Edinburgh Quartet played the introduction, rhythmic accents clear and incisive without ever being merely metronomic; a subtle delicacy characterised the first theme, a vivacious dancing quality the second. The contrast with the second movement was thus brought out strikingly. The opening had a slow tread and the whole was characterised by gravity of both tone and emotion, by playing of great beauty. The remote key of E major gives the music, when as well played as this, a solemnity and an introspective quality which speak eloquently of Haydn’s profound understanding of human emotion. The third movement found the Edinburgh Quartet articulating Haydn’s contrapuntal structures with unforced clarity and making the most of the contrast between the sociable G major minuet and the more troubled trio in G minor. In the final movement the reading of the ‘riding’ rhythms of the opening had more than a little darkness to it, a hint of the tragic even, its phrases firmly shaped and hard driven; but the darkness dissipated as the sheer energetic exuberance of Haydn’s musical invention took charge and led us to the affirmatory conclusion, played with certainty, but quite without complacency. It was good to be reminded, by such an intelligent and sympathetic performance, just what a remarkably inventive work this is, written by a man no longer young, and so full of emotional and (implicit) moral wisdom.
It has been suggested by some writers that Haydn’s Opus 74 quartets can be numbered amongst those works in which one can sense the beginnings of musical romanticism. Whatever the truth of that judgement, one certainly couldn’t refuse the epithet ‘romantic’ to the second of Borodin’s quartets, written (in just two months) in 1881. The Edinburgh Quartet gave us a committed, sympathetic and technically assured performance. The rhapsodic opening of the first movement breathed contentment, the lithe first theme and the more directly vigorous second theme were both attractively phrased and the Quartet made the most of the effective passages in which the composer juxtaposes two bowed instruments against two played pizzicato. The ensuing scherzo had a fitting business of motion and a relishing of Borodin’s melodic fertility. The Nocturne was played lyrically, without over-indulgence, the dialogue of cello and violin persuasively done, and that theme got its full due. The rondo Finale was largely relaxed and generally full of brio. But for all of the Edinburgh Quartet’s evident enthusiasm for the work, and their accomplished advocacy on its behalf, I found myself conscious of how relatively lightweight a piece it is heard after the Haydn. The whole has lyrical charm, certainly, and that is no mean thing. But programming it next to mature Haydn of such quality served, in part, to reveal the limitations of Borodin’s quartet (the first is surely a finer work?). One missed here the weight of humanity so evident in Haydn; Borodin seemed relatively slight in comparison. But that is no reflection on the quality of the Edinburgh Quartet’s reading of the work – in Haydn and Borodin alike they were an object lesson in ensemble work, in seriousness without undue solemnity and in musical communication. Here’s to the next fifty years of the Quartet!
Glyn Pursglove
Fauré, Harrington, Ravel: Erato Piano Trio (Yuri Kalnits, violin; Julia Morneweg, cello; John Paul Elkins, piano), Reardon-Smith Theatre, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, 7.3.2010 (GPu)
Fauré: Piano Trio in D minor, Op.120
Harrington: Twisted Reverie
Ravel: Piano Trio in A minor
Master and pupil; but by the time that Ravel’s trio was premiered in Paris on 28 January 1915, his studies with Fauré at the Conservatoire in that city were long over. And, by a kind of historical irony, Fauré’s solitary piano trio was not premiered until 12 May 1923, some eight years after that of his erstwhile student.
Fauré’s trio was his penultimate work, the work of a sick man, written between August 1922 and the early months of 1923. Despite increasing ill-health, in particular, a painful condition of deafness of which Fauré was making mention as early as 1903, he remained director of the Conservatoire until 1920. The trio – some of it written at the home of his friends the Maillots at their home near the beautiful Lac d’Annecy in the Haute Savoie – is necessarily a work with a strong element of the retrospective. Written in its composer’s mid to late seventies, the trio is decidedly the music of old age; its serenity exists in the knowledge of death’s approach; its energies are remembered as much as current (even in the relative violence of the closing allegro vivo). Perhaps it was not surprising that some of the emotional depths of this essentially introspective work of old age should have eluded the young and very talented musicians of the Erato Trio. In the opening movement Julia Morneweg played the long, lyrical first theme with plenty of feeling and the trio as a whole communicated a good deal of the movement’s complex structure, even if the interplay between instruments occasionally seemed a little stiff and relatively unyielding. The long andantino was studded with beautiful moments, especially towards its close, the shot-silk textures with their ambiguities of self-reflection and memory and their unexpected harmonic resolutions were well realized. In some earlier pages however, the full magic of the movement sometimes evaded the trio’s grasp. They were more consistently impressive in the more outward-facing music of the closing allegro, beginning as it did with a good sense of drama (or at least as near to the dramatic as this subtlest of works ever comes). The playing here had a more assured and natural sense of interplay and musical dialogue.
Ravel’s trio is a more openly extrovert work, less full of enigmas than that of Fauré and the Erato Trio – formed only in 2005 at the Royal College of Music in London – treated the audience to an impressive reading of it. The opening movement (marked modéré) danced persuasively, the music revolving around Ravel’s pedal-points with commendable clarity. The Basque inflections of the opening theme were painted with a light touch and the second theme had a pleasing suavity to it. The second movement, the Pantoum, got sprightly treatment, the whole both engaged and engaging. The chorale-like melody in F major was played with particular beauty, the alternations of thematic materials handled with a clear sense of form and purpose (and the group’s concentration was not disturbed when their cellist lost her bow on the final note of the movement!). In the third movement, John Paul Elkins’ initial statement of the theme in the lower register of the piano created a feeling of spaciousness which was sustained throughout, as Ravel constantly changes the patterns of duet and trio. There was an edge of melancholy to the reading, but any temptation to wallow in this was avoided, and there was real beauty in the movement’s close, as the textual density was reduced and the movement sank back into silence – a silence immediately succeeded by the vivacity of Ravel’s ‘Final’. Here the Erato Trio were particularly satisfying, their precision of ensemble and their unity of purpose particularly striking; the considerable technical demands of the music left them altogether unfazed and the alternations between 5/4 and 7/4 time were integrated into a unified approach to the larger shape of the movement; without inappropriate inflation of effect, the decidedly orchestral nature of Ravel’s writing in this last movement was given powerful expression.
Between these two French trios the Erato sprang an unprogrammed surprise. In the days before the concert the Trio had spent some time working with student composers at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff. They had evidently been especially impressed by the work of one of those young composers, David Harrington, since they chose to give a world premiere of his Twisted Reverie. A single-movement work, Twisted Reverie was characterized by some emphatically accented phrasing, by a series of intense motifs thrown rapidly from instrument to instrument, by its use of brief fragments which coalesced and collided in interesting ways, while slower, more lyrical interludes balanced the work’s exclamatory attacks. Harrington’s writing was well-judged instrumentally – that for the cello seemed particularly effective – and there was a real sense of musical conversation between instrumental equals. There appeared – on admittedly very limited evidence – to be real promise here. The young composer came up to take a deserved bow and to congratulate/thank the Trio.
The Erato Trio is already an accomplished ensemble, and there is every reason to imagine that as they mature further they will be capable of even more in future years.
Glyn Pursglove
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Beethoven: Llyr Williams (piano), Reardon-Smith Theatre, Cardiff, 7.2.2010
Sonata in F minor, Op.2, No.1
Sonata in A, Op.2, No.2
Sonata in C, Op.2, No.3
These three sonatas of Beethoven’s youth (the first to be graced with an Opus number, but not the first that he wrote) are, in important respects already very characteristic of their composer, even if one wouldn’t readily confuse them with the products of Beethoven’s maturity. As in Beethoven’s later work, these sonatas simultaneously exist in an obvious continuity with what had preceded them (insofar as they clearly echo the piano writing of, say, Haydn and Clementi) and also, in what is only a seeming paradox, subvert and tease the expectations which the listener’s familiarity with these precedents, with the tradition out of which the sonatas grow, will have encouraged them to bring to the hearing of this music. They are, that is to say, at one and the same time, profoundly traditional and passionately rebellious – they already embody the essence of Beethoven, in short.
The fine Welsh pianist Llyr Williams, now in his mid-thirties, is currently engaged in a series of concerts which will see him play all of the Beethoven sonatas during 2010 (amidst recitals and concerts, in the first half of the year, in Tokyo, in Innsbruck and at the Wigmore Hall). This concert, in the admirable and valuable series jointly promoted by Cwpanaur and the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, was part of this ongoing cycle.
The first of the three sonatas has claims to be the most immediately striking of the three. Its opening allegro was played by Williams with a persuasive and engaging energy (after a slightly tentative opening), in a performance which captured both the passion and the elegance which coexist in surprising complementarity in this movement, a complementarity expressed both by neat contrasts and by unexpected (yet, with the advantage of hindsight, altogether inevitable) reconciliations of diverse musical materials. Some pianists have perhaps made more of the drama of this fist movement, but Williams’s interpretation clarified structure and pattern with impressive lucidity. The ensuing adagio was an exercise in youthful nobility, which Williams invested with an attractive cantabile quality; here, again, he provided a model of structural clarity, not least in the way he phrased which the elaborated repetitions of the movement’s themes. The judgement of tempo here was persuasively impressive and the whole fused nobility with tenderness. The third movement had a well-considered sense of scale, avoiding the kind of inflation which performances on a modern grand can all too easily acquire in movements such as this. The interpretation of the closing prestissimo had real fire, imbued with a precipitous, stormy momentum, the triplet arpeggios of the closing coda played with gratifying conviction and facility.
The second sonata in the set is, to a degree, differentiated from its two fellows by its more extensive use of counterpoint. In the initial allegro, Williams’s performance was, once more, striking for the clarity with which it exposed the architecture of Beethoven’s writing – a consistent virtue of Williams’s current playing. The stately slow movement, with its long lines over a walking bass, was invested with real solemnity, though Williams also found some gentleness, and even playfulness, in certain passages. The allegretto which follows is dominated by short figures, in contrast to the long melodic phrases which had characterised the slow movement; Williams’s touch struck me as just a little heavy in its opening pages – though it is fair to say that these are pages which generally sound better on the kind of instrument for which Beethoven was writing than they do on the modern grand. There was a delightful grace, though, to Williams’s treatment of the trio. The closing grazioso was just that, and Williams’s reading had about it an attractive, organic fluency, the relative complexities of Beethoven’s structure negotiated with an air of naturalness and relaxation and a sense of power held in check.
The final sonata of the set was once described by Tovey as “luxurious and loosely constructed”, which surely overstates the case or, at any rate, overlooks the real virtues of the music. In the first movement, full of sparkle and invention, Llyr Williams supplied all the virtuosity the music demands, in a performance of considerable panache and relaxed precision. In the adagio the syncopated upbeats and the telling silences of the main theme were very well handled; there was a grave spirituality at times, and the dramatic moment when the initial motif returns in C major (in an e major slow movement) was genuinely arresting; the final cadences had a poignant inconclusiveness which made the transition to the glittering runs of the scherzo, with its imitative writing, all the more effective. The allegro finale, a fast movement in 6/8 time, has an all-embracing vitality and wit, qualities which Williams embraced wholeheartedly. The whole made for an exhilarating conclusion to a Sunday lunchtime very well spent.
Llyr Williams is a pianist of very real quality. His greatest virtues, at present, relate to the firmness of his structural grasp and his sense of musical architecture, his capacity to put the music’s organising principles clearly before the ears and minds of his hearers, but never at the cost of the merely reductive. If I have a slight reservation it is perhaps that his playing, as yet, doesn’t have quite the variety of tone that it might. But his work has a genuine substance, an intellectual weight and (apt) gravity often absent from the playing of some of the more hyped pianists of his generation. Those able to hear all of Williams’s 2010 Beethoven sonata cycle are to be envied.
Glyn Pursglove
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Beethoven and Brahms: Barbirolli Quartet: Rakhi Singh, Katie Stillman (violin), Ella Brinch (viola), Ashok Kouda (cello). National Museum Wales, Cardiff, 17.1.2010 (GPu)
Beethoven String Quartet in A, Op. 18, No.5
Brahms String Quartet in C minor, Op.51, No.1
The Barbirolli Quartet, founded in 2003 at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, is one of the most distinguished and promising of the young British-based quartets. They have already notched up quite a few awards – including a Tunnell Trust Award; they have been selected by ECHO (the European Concert Halls Organisation) to undertake a European tour in 2010, which will take them to important venues in Amsterdam, Paris, Salzburg, Cologne, Stockholm, Athens, Barcelona and elsewhere. My description of them as ‘promising’ is not, I hasten to add, intended to carry any of that air of polite reservation which the use of the term can sometimes bear; they already very accomplished and very well worth hearing – but they will doubtless get even better with greater maturity.
The programme they played for this concert in the series of lunchtime concerts held in the Reardon Smith Theatre of the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, was made up of a vividly contrasting pair of quartets (though, interestingly, each was part of the first set of quartets to be published by its composer). The Quartet in A is perhaps the most ‘classical’ of Beethoven’s six opus 18 quartets; urbane and at ease with itself, it is marked by echoes of Mozart’s K464 quartet, with which it shares a key (so much so that it has been described as a ‘commentary’ on the earlier work). In her words of introduction the Barbirolli’s leader spoke of it as a “sunny” and essentially “sprightly” work, epithets it surely merits. Brahms’s C minor quartet, on the other hand is very far being bathed in sunlight; cellist Ashok Kouda introduced this work (describing it as his “favourite piece of music in the world ever”!) and spoke of it in terms of “darkness” and “intensity”.
The Barbirolli’s Beethoven was full of vivacity, and the spirit of the dance was never very far away. The opening allegro had a delightful, inviting sense of instrumental conversation, sometimes quasi-domestic, sometimes implicitly dramatic. In the minuet which follows (as it does in K464), the playing of the two violins in the opening phrase (to be repeated several times in the movement) was strikingly beautiful and the later variations on the theme were also very attractive; much of the movement had a thoroughly Viennese lilt to it, especially in the waltz melody of the trio. In the ensuing andante there was some real emotional weight, but not too much; the whole was very well paced and the way in which the music constantly changes the relationships between the two voices was very persuasively shaped. The opening of the final allegro, though, sounded just a little inhibited, even a little heavy-handed; but as the movement continued more air was let in, and the well-judged contrasts of tempo and dynamics contributed to a sense of unforced finality, of comfortable arrival at an expected destination. Rakhi Singh’s introductory remarks had spoken of this “youthful” work as a “gem” – and pretty well all of the gem’s facets shone brightly in this engaging performance.
Brahms’s first quartet (or, at any rate, the first that he published – he claimed to have worked on twenty predecessors without before being satisfied with the results!) is an altogether more sombre affair. It is a quartet to which the word tragic has often been applied, and with good enough reason. If I say that this performance by the young Barbirolli Quartet wasn’t one to which that epithet was perfectly applicable, I don’t intend to criticise it, but merely to try to say what was distinctive about it. There was plenty of troubled passion in the opening allegro, plenty of that intensity of which Ashok Kouda had spoken in introducing the work. Indeed there was a kind of feverish turbulence (at no cost to discipline) in their reading of the work; there may have been less sheer gravitas than can be heard in some performances, but by way of rich compensation there was a stormy impetuosity. In the second movement, marked ‘Romanze, poco adagio’ there was a certain tranquillity after the violence of the opening storm, but it was never a tranquillity that went long untroubled, being shot through with an apprehension of future disturbance and permeated by a strong sense of melancholy. The movement’s complex rhythms were very skilfully handled, the pauses and silences full of anticipatory awareness. Like the second, the third movement spoke of night more than day, being dominated by a troubled pathos, enlivened only briefly by the pizzicato writing of the trio – the light-heartedness of which felt like no more than a brief respite. The opening bars of the brief closing allegro spoke of renewed anger and ferocity and the ensemble work here was particularly accomplished, the energy sustained in what, though it recapitulates materials from both the first and second movements, felt less like a neat resolution than an insistence all too likely to be repeated. The Barbirolli’s reading of this quartet conveyed their evident enthusiasm for it; I have heard weightier, more fully ‘tragic’ readings of the work; but this performance had about it a particular youthful anguish, as though the music expressed not so much the weight of fully realised tragic experience but rather the youthful anticipation of suffering to come, a youthful apprehension of the human condition. The results were compelling.
Glyn Pursglove
Reproduced by courtesy of MusicWeb International www.musicweb-international.com.