Feature: The Edinburgh Quartet
Hugh reflects on his love of string quartets and reviews three recent shows by The Edinburgh Quartet.
I should begin with a confession. I love string quartets and the Edinburgh Quartet have in their many different forms always been a very good string quartet. My love of string quartets began when I moved from Scotland to Harlow New Town in Essex in 1960. The Harlow Development Corporation, the government body which built the new town, and Harlow Council had the very good idea of recruiting a young string quartet straight out of the Royal Academy of Music and offering them flats in Harlow, a rehearsal space and a grant of £10,000 a year which was a lot of money in the early 1960s. In turn the Quartet, which was called the Alberni Quartet, became the centre of musical life in Harlow; they gave monthly concerts in the local theatre and I would sit in the front row drinking in the great works for quartets. They brought musical friends to the town, such as The Lindsay Quartet; they helped put together a professional orchestra on Sunday evenings to accompany Harlow Chorus in its programme; they encouraged the development of a Harlow Symphony Orchestra and helped all the local comprehensive schools to have music schools which would take place during lunch breaks, after school and on Saturday mornings.
The BBC were so impressed with music in Harlow that they made a documentary in the early 1970s about musical life in the town called The Pied Pipers of Harlow. I became a great music lover and when I became an MEP for Essex and Hertfordshire I became president of the Friends of Music in the European Parliament and helped develop music policy for the Parliament (along with Nana Mouskouri!). So when the international recording industry had a conference in Brussels they asked me to choose the music for their prestige dinner, and I was delighted to invite The Alberni Quartet from Harlow to play for the assembled guests.
Of course in Scotland we do have the Big Noise experiments, initially in Raploch Stirling, and now in Dundee and Glasgow, but there is a strong case for making music a much more important part of our schools and our communities. It not only helps education but makes communities happier. I am also a great fan of the Edinburgh Quartet. I have listened to them many times in the 20 years I have lived in Edinburgh, in particular at the wonderful free University lunchtime concerts at the Reid Concert Hall. Often sitting in the front row near the quartet I have enjoyed listening to and feeling the music in my bones. Indeed the longest serving member of the quartet cellist Mark Bailey who has been in the quartet for 37 years has a vibrato which you can feel in your body. The other members of the quartet have changed a lot over the years but thankfully the quality hasn't suffered.
Darkness to Light: Finding Family, The Edinburgh Quartet, Methodist Church, 17/01/20
Today‘s quartet is led by first violinist Tijmen Huisingh, who comes from the Netherlands and after a distinguished career there joined the Northern Sinfonia and the Edinburgh Quartet in 2017. Second violin and making her debut here is French violinist Gaelle-Anne Michel, who after an early career in France moved to London and played widely with British chamber orchestras and like her leader recently joined the Northern Sinfonia as second violin. Catherine Marwood, the viola player, began her musical life in London in the Fairfield Quartet but has become well known in Scotland as a player in the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the Scottish Ensemble and the Hebrides Ensemble. Finally cellist Mark Bailey also began his musical career in London but has been a member of the Quartet for 37 years, a real achievement. Next year the Quartet marks its 60th birthday and we will no doubt see some special concerts to celebrate it. The good news is the Quartet on tonight's evidence is in very good form and I for one am looking forward to their birthday.
Tonight's concert is in the austere settings of the Methodist Church in Nicholson Square. It‘s a very plain setting, but has a good acoustic and there is a decent audience on a cold Friday night in January. The theme of the Quartet's winter series is 'Darkness to Light: Finding Family'; this is a theme of mental well-being which reflects some of the outreach work of the Quartet.To this end they had chosen three composers whose lives reflected, in their words, " a time of personal flux "; so Rachmaninov, Shostakovich and Schumann were our troubled composers. However, the concert began with Haydn, who with the nickname of 'Papa Haydn' you might think had a happy life; however, a little study suggests otherwise. Perhaps composers need troubled lives to give them inspiration! Certainly Haydn was in many ways the father of the string quartet, and his Quartet in G Op 33 No.5, composed in 1781 is, according to the very good programme notes by Roger B Williams, his most mature quartet of this period. Williams also suggests that the opening notes of the quartet might have influenced Haydn‘s greatest pupil, Beethoven, when he came to compose his first symphony 20 years later. It certainly is a wonderfully mature work beautifully played by the quartet who seem perfectly together in their new format. This is followed by Rachmaninoff's incomplete string quartet, written when he was a troubled teenager. It is very lyrical and sounds very Russian, and not surprisingly very influenced by Tchaikovsky. Then we got Shostakovich's Two Pieces for String Quartet (Elegy and Polka), which was composed around 1931 but didn't see the light of day until 1984. Shostakovich was under great political pressure to produce politically acceptable music and the Elegy here was taken from his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsenk, which was savaged by Stalin - so no surprise he didn't release it at the time.
The final work was Schumann's great Quartet in A Minor, written in 1842 at a time when he was happy with his wife Clara, although of course he suffered greatly with mental health problems at other times. It is a lovely romantic work which shows that even troubled composers can produce joyful works at times and maybe a little angst helps composers produce great work.
Rush Hour Concert, The Edinburgh Quartet, French Institute, 06/02/20
The Edinburgh Quartet have over the years done rush hour concerts, taking an hour between 6-7pm. The idea is that you get a perfect bite-sized concert, leaving you time to do other things in the evening. Tonight they are using the splendid concert room in the French Institute, with lovely smells of the restaurant wafting up from below. On a nostalgic note, in a previous life I spent some years working in this building as it was the committee room of the Scottish Parliament before the new parliament was built. The French Institute are the latest tenants, and the Quartet provide a very nice glass of wine prior to the concert and a chance to peruse the programme, which with four short works from baroque to minimalism promised variety.
The concert began with Gossec's Quartet No 6 in A major, which proved to be a lovely melodic introduction to the concert. Gossec (1734-1829) was a French composer of symphonies, quartets and operas who was very well known in the 19th century but has somewhat faded today. On the basis of this taster I'd like to hear more. The new members of the quartet (referred to in my review of their last concert) are bedding in well, and looking as if they have been together for years. The concert continued with Rachmaninoff's Romance and Scherzo, from his incomplete string quartet. However to add variety Tijmen Huisingh, violin, and Catherine Marwood, viola, gave us 4 duos by Italian composer Luciano Berio. He was a modern serialist composer so there isn't a lot of melody in his duos. I didn't personally find it interesting to break up the beauty of Rachmaninoff's String Quartet, especially as their inclusion pushed the concert 7 minutes over the hour! The Rachmaninoff was wonderful by the way! The next work was Phillip Glass's String Quartet No 3 Mishima which he wrote for the film Mishima, about the life and death of the great Japanese writer. I like some of Phillip Glass's minimalist music, in particular his music for the film Koyaanisqatsi, although when it was premiered in the cinemas in the 1980s it was often seen through a haze of dope! I also liked the first version of his opera Akhnaten at the English National Opera 35 years ago, but not the more recent ENO and Met production. Glass says his music is based on repetitive patterns and that is certainly true. His string quartet Mishima is repetitive but does have some melody in between, enough to make it pleasant but not great.
The final work was the best: in honour of the Beethoven anniversary, the Quartet will play a movement from the last four great Beethoven Quartets. Tonight we get the third movement of the String Quartet No 16. It is labelled Lento assai e cantante tranquilo, and it is a gem, beautifully played by the quartet. Overall this was a lovely rush hour experience, another part of Edinburgh's mosaic of great music. More please!
Darkness to Light: Mementos from the Past, The Edinburgh Quartet, Methodist Church, 08/03/20
The theme of the Edinburgh Quartet's winter series is Darkness to Light which is meant to reflect the troubled lives of the composers. Today on a bright sunny afternoon it seems more appropriate to the weather, as quartet leader Tijmen Huisingh says "after a long wet winter it seems like the first day of Spring". He promises us an interesting eclectic programme from the first ever string quartet, to one of the most recent works by James Macmillan. He is right, and all of the works are played with the perfect precision we have come to expect from the Edinburgh Quartet. We begin with Haydn's, indeed probably anyone's, first string quartet, Op 1 No 1, written in the 1750s for a local Baron who wanted it played at his home by four musicians. So the quartet was born.This quartet is in five movements, unlike most quartets today which tend to be in four. The Adagio, the central section, is the most substantial, linking the other parts together. I hadn’t realise that Haydn didn’t go to music school, but learnt on the job when a chorister in St Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna. He taught himself composition and his string quartet is one of the first fruits of that self education. It’s not his finest work and is a simple affair, compared to his later quartets - he wrote 68 of them! However it is a very sweet melodic piece, with some lovely melodies and some contrasting themes from the cello and the violins. It proved to be an excellent opening item and got a good response from the rather thin audience, maybe 60 strong. Since the Edinburgh Quartet can fill the Reid concert hall on a Tuesday lunchtime or get 90 people into a 'rush hour concert', I can only conclude it was the rugby on TV that deterred them from attending (and Scotland beat France!). Or maybe fear of the coronavirus is having an effect on audiences!
This is followed by Schumann's Quartet in F Op 41 No 2, a much more mature work written by Schumann in one of his periods of angst about his life and his marriage. He studied the string quartets of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven and produced his three string quartets in 1842, performing them first for his wife Clara's birthday on September 13th. She apparently liked them and said "they are new and at the same time lucid, finely worked and always in quartet idiom" and of course they were beautifully played by the quartet. This is followed after the interval by an exquisite short work by James Macmillan, named Memento and written in 1994 for a friend who had died. It is based on Gaelic psalm-singing and is lovely.The concert concludes with Debussy's Quartet in G minor Op 10, written in 1893. It is as Roger William's says in his programme note "a work of precocious originality heralding the arrival of a new and important original voice in French music." However, although verging into new music, Debussy remains very melodic and indeed the central themes of this piece tend to stick with you long after the concert. The quartet played it beautifully, as they did all afternoon and they got a warm response from a disappointingly small audience.
Photograph by Martin C Stewart.
