15 String Quartets in Two Days!

 Last week I survived a marathon listening experience, hearing six different ensembles play string quartets at the Gulbenkian String Quartet Festival over two afternoons. The quality was high, the hall full (mostly), and the price low (about 6 euros per concert). My brain was a bit scrambled by the end of concert #6, but I really enjoyed the playing overall, and heard some new pieces. I won't summarize each concert  in detail, but will instead try to group my impressions. 

Who Played? In order of seniority, I  heard

• Minguett Quartet (Germany/Austria) founded 1988, 33 recordings
• Danel Quartet (Manchester), founded 1991, 23 recordings
• Jerusalem Quartet (Israel), founded 1993, 20 recordings
• Belcea Quartet (London), founded 1994, 14 recordings
• Simply Quartet (Vienna), founded 2010, no recordings
• Van Kuijk Quartet (Paris), founded 2012, 7 recordings

Nicely, there was a range of ages and international presence. Most quartets had members from multiple countries, often with a common center of music study, eg Royal College of Music. 

What was Played?  Composers included

• Haydn: Quartet in G major op 77/1 (1799)
• Beethoven: op 18/4 (1800), op 127 (1825), op 132 (3rd mvmt) (1825)
• Schumann #1 (A minor) (1842)
• Mendelssohn: #6 in F minor, op. 80 (1847)
• Verdi (choral transcription)
• Brahms #2, B flat, op 67 (1875)
• Smetana  #1, E minor (1876)
• Tchaikovsky #3 in E flat minor, op 30 (1876)
• Anton Webern Langsamer Satz (1905)
• Prokofiev #1 in B minor, op. 50 (1930)
• Mieczyslaw Weinberg #2, op. 3 (1940)
• Shostakovich #2, A major, op 68 (1944)
• Luigi Nono (Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima) (1980)
• Baptiste Trotignon Ces messieurs (2023)
• Julian Anderson (#4) (2023)

So there was a nice variety of Classical (4), Romantic (6),  and 20th-21st century (7) pieces. 

Notes: Beethoven was the only composer with more than one offering. Major omissions were Mozart and Bartok. The two works from this century were both commissions (by Julian Anderson for the Belcea Quartet, and by Baptiste Trotignon for the Van Kuijk Quartet). 

Technical Notes:

Quartet Membership: 19 male, 5 female (determined by my observation alone). More graduates from conservatories are now female, so these newish quartets were perhaps atypically male

Music was read from: traditional paper scores (16), E tablets (8): This reflects the increasing use of pads that I am seeing in performances. I now use this for orchestra and chamber playing, as it is easier to turn pages using foodpad! Also it allows me to read chamber music from the full score, without the worry of excessive manual page turning. 

What Stood Out Musically?

Unfamiliar but excellent piece: The Anton Webern Langsamer Satz  was composed when he was only 19 and still a student. It does not at all sound like his short, prickly timbre-related pieces of his maturity, but instead like an extended postromantic journey similar to Zemlinsky, or Schoenberg's Verklaerte Nacht. The piece was really engaging with fine forward movement moving us through the postromantic vines and flowers. A keeper!

Innovative Programs: The opening concert by the young Quatuor Van Kuijk consisted of five new quartet movements by French jazz composer Baptiste Trotignon, one each in the style of Faure, Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc, and Satie. The quartet preceded each of these by transcriptions of pieces written by the composers (eg Debussy Petite Suite, Poulenc song Les Chemins de l'amour). The Trotignon pieces were excellent. I felt like I was on the Champs Élysées hearing a guy who likes jazz playing the composers in his unique style. I think the group's choice of transcriptions could have been a bit better matched to what the composer produced, though, so I would have heard the connection better. 

Similar was the second-day opening concert by the Minguet Quartet. The concert centered on the 40-minute Fragmente-Stille by modernist Luigi Nono. The piece had LOTS of silence, with many 5-10 second pauses, followed by a reboot and re-progression, rather like a modernist Bruckner. It had similar soundscape as Ligeti (microtones, interesting timbre), but was much quieter. It was a good test of the audience (to avoid coughing, fidgeting) but the crowd mostly stayed very attentive. Prior to the piece, the quartet played three pieces that Nono said influenced the quartet: song transcriptions by early Renaissance Flemish composer Johannes Ockeghem, a quartet transcription of the choral piece Ave Maria: scala enigmatica from Verdi's Four Sacred Pieces, and the mystical third movement from the Beethoven op. 127 quartet ("Holy Song of a Convalescent to the Deity, in the Lydian Mode"). While I could not hear any direct connections of these pieces to the Nono, they each certainly had some of the mystic, other-worldly feel of the piece, and put one in the right mood. Very cool!

Best overall concert: Surprisingly, the best balanced concert was by the youngest group, the Simply Quartet. They were formed in a Chinese conservatory, but then two players moved to Vienna where they took on new members from Austria and Norway. Their study in Vienna is really paying off. They achieved a deep, resonant, well-matched sound that reminded me of the Vienna Philharmonic. Their concert was well-paced, with crackling Haydn followed by rich Webern, then brisk and well-articulated Schumann. Look out for this group! Also, they really seemed to be enjoying themselves. It is OK to smile as you play, but few besides this group ever did this. It made me pull for them.

 

What Stood Out Extra-musically?

During the ending performance of the Jerusalem Quartet, there were three brief shouting interruptions by young people protesting Israel's invasion of Palestine. This has happened before with this quartet, with anti-Israel protests during concerts dating back to at least 2018 (well before the current invasion). There were police on hand and prepared to remove the protesters. While I supported the protester's aims, I am not sure this was the best way to do it. The quartet members are all Israeli citizens, but all now live in Europe. All served in the Israeli military, but this is mandatory for all citizens. None have made public pro-military statements that I could find online. Also, I suspect this audience was already sympathetic to the Palestinian cause (string quartet audiences tend to be intellectual and a bit nerdy, overall), so I doubt that many if any minds were changed. I did not see any public coverage of the protests, which would have at least broadened the audience. 

What about the effect on the concert, and on me? Because all three interruptions were during quiet portions (or rests) in the opening Smetana piece, the main effect on me was to make me tense, and not be able to focus on the played music. This was my first experience with a protest during a concert, and at least for me, the protest did not change my views (I support the protester's aims) but did disrupt my enjoyment of a concert I paid to see. So overall this did not have a positive effect on me, or one that stimulated me to reflect more on the big issue. Is this the best way to protest?