Classical review: Vanbrugh Quartet

CIT Cork School Of Music

Ian Wilson, introducing his 15th string quartet, ‘Alluvio’, spoke of his close relationship with the Vanbrugh Quartet, praised in particular their willingness to experiment and their absolute dedication to getting into the heart and soul of the music they are playing.

It was good to hear his explanation of his composition’s title. The music was, he explained, inspired by the river flooding that he witnessed in recent years. He was loud in his praise of the Hungarian composer, Gyorgy Kurtag, born 1926, whose ‘Hommage a Mihály András’ closed the first half of the recital.

Bookending these two contemporary works were two great audience favourites---Ravel’s only string quartet and Dvorak’s much-loved ‘American’ quartet, Op 96 in F. Kurtag’s 12 Microludes for String Quartet (the composer’s subtitle) proved to be tiny, brief, eerie, exceptionally colourful, mysterious pieces that aroused a whole lot of mental images of space and time in my imagination.

I was sufficiently captivated by the imaginative sounds, sequences and effects in both works to want to hear them again. Wilson’s work, falling into four sections that he calls Fall, Rise, Breach and Dispersal, did create these flood images, without being particularly dissonant. Both composers explore the extremes of dynamics and make effective use of harmonics.

I was not completely convinced by the agitated descending, overlapping scale-like passages in the Breach section of ‘Alluvio’, but perhaps they may work better for me the next time I hear this piece.

The ethereal opening, marked trés doux, to Ravel’s quartet gives no hint of the magic, fun, mystery, excitement, and mayhem that is to come. The mayhem comes in the final movement, marked ‘vif et agité’ where he shifts the time signature from 5/8 to 3/4 and (as in each movement) manages to integrate/restate elements of the work’s opening statement.

The Ravel calls for (and got) a cerebral approach by the players while Dvorak’s ‘American’ quartet calls for playing from the heart – and the Vanbrugh gave us exactly that in a gutsy, warm, colourful, exciting performance of great beauty.