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Founded by four Cambridge undergraduates in 1969, The Fitzwilliam Quartet, despite inevitable changes in personnel, has been a firm member of the chamber music establishment for the best part of its four decades of existence. And if you think their own lifespan is impressive, check out their repertoire; the music found in Wednesday’s programme collectively spanned well over three centuries!
The opening work, a short Fantazia originally written for viol consort by Purcell in 1680, proved that, given the right attitude and understanding of period performance, modern instruments are no barrier to authentic music-making. Playing with admirable lightness and deftness, all the while withholding vibrato (rarely used in period performances), the four players achieved incredible balance, allowing Purcell’s glowing harmonies to naturally swell and fade with great elegance. Viola-player and founding member Alan George shared with me after the concert that he frequently performs on period instruments and brings up his view that quartets don’t take enough advantage of scholarship: “String quartets are just so conventional!” he complained, “we never try to be, I think that’s just the way we end up.”
Intriguingly, the Purcell did not seem worlds away from the work that followed, the floating textures of Jeremy Thurlow’s 2003 Ancient Stone at Twilight; a collaboration with poet John Kinsella. The music and its accompanying poem married well together: Kinsella’s ‘growth of ancient stone’ and ‘pulse of the river’ mirrored the organic nature of Thurlow’s composition; a hazy style evoking the sound worlds of Vaughan-Williams and Delius brought to life atmospherically by the Fitzwilliams.
Next came Shostakovich’s 11th Quartet in F minor, a troubling work with a mercurial nature that, as George suggests in his programme notes, seems to be a ‘fateful premonition’ of the heart attack that the composer would suffer only weeks later in May, 1969. The quartet captured the distant threat of the opening brilliantly; the cello’s ominous ruminations buried beneath the winding lyricism of the violin. Transitions between contrasting movements were executed to stunning effect: the Scherzo emerged seamlessly from the Andantino and fascinatingly brittle textures adopted by the violins gradually developed a pricklier persona; a bizarre tension created through the use of repeated notes and glissandi.
After the thunderous bipolarity of the Recitative there came the explosive angst of the Etude. Here stunning virtuosity was displayed by violinist Lucy Russell and cellist Heather Tuach, before the bitter realisation of the Elegy and the creeping anxiety of the Finale brought the work to its unsettlingly hollow conclusion.
On asking Alan George after the concert whether he felt the programme had a musical unity, he was quick to point to both Shostakovich and Haydn as masters of string quartet writing. This was demonstrated in the performance of outstanding clarity of the latter’s Op.77 no. 2 quartet. Indeed, the bipolar nature of the preceding Shostakovich work highlighted similarly rapid and unpredictable changes of character in Haydn’s work: the grand sweeping chords of the opening gave way to passages of tender affection, which in turn would transform into moments of cheeky humour with mischievous turns of phrase. The Fitzwilliams galloped through the Minuet with vigour and precision, before rounding off the contemplative Andante with a finale of youthful energy and enthusiasm.
After the interval came the stormy introspection and sighing romanticism of Tchaikovsky’s Second Quartet in F major. The Fitzwilliams lent the work gravity: in the opening movement, optimistic passages seemed to be swallowed up by darkness and even the initial release of the Scherzo was eventually victim to a weighty build in intensity.
George’s programme notes alluded to the quartet’s symphonic style that was most obvious in the slow movement where passages of epic scale suddenly give way to moments of intimacy and in the determined finale where the fugue and coda were performed with drama and breathlessness. Afterwards, George spoke of how thinking in terms of the symphonic aspects of the piece enables the performers to colour and ‘orchestrate’ the work. “But it’s the same in the Haydn,” he explained, “You hear a passage and think ‘Ah, that’s where the drums would be!’”
The programme came full circle with the encore, a reprise of the Purcell Fantazia that opened the programme but this time the group were joined by saxophonist Uwe Steinmetz whose improvisations weaved gracefully through the texture, beautifully complimenting the quartet’s playing.
This fusion of the early and the modern seemed to sum up the attitude of the quartet. When I asked George whether he and his colleagues had planned for the programme to encompass three centuries of composition, he simply pointed out that it’s what they usually play. In a world of specialisation, the Fitzwilliam Quartet is a group that not only want to embrace both the old, the new and everything in between with equal fervour but feel it’s their duty to do no less. No wonder they’ve lasted forty years. Here’s to the next forty…
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