West Cork Chamber Music Festival review: Mesmerising Schubert, achingly beautiful Beethoven and lovely SmetanaSchubert wrote his first string quartet around the age of 13. It’s a work that I never expected to hear in concert. It’s not the creation of a Mozart or Mendelssohn-like child prodigy.
The piece is long , and the disparity in playing time is even greater than those tallies would suggest. The Signum’s approach was utterly mesmerising in its unfailing clarity. Their music-making was soft-spoken, each instrumental line distinct, the players happy to present sections of the work through the slenderest threads of sound and in a range of highly expressive tone colours that simply aren’t achievable at higher volumes.
The weekend’s other highlight was another string quartet, Beethoven’s late Quartet in B flat, Op. 130, the one that originally ended with the outrageously complex Grosse Fuge, which Beethoven chose to replace with a simpler movement. It was played on Sunday by the Chiaroscuro Quartet, a group which plays standing up, and, if anything, brought an even greater aching beauty to Beethoven than the Signum did to Schubert.
Denmark’s Nightingale Quartet made their strongest impression in a well-mannered account of Smetana’s Quartet No 1 where it was their sheer loveliness in the slow movement that stood out.
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Source: IrishTimes - 🏆 3. / 98 Read more »