East Neuk Festival: Elias Quartet
Kilrenny Church - 29/06/22
The East Neuk Festival launched with the Elias Quartet on the Wednesday 29th June at 6 pm in Kilrenny Church, in an imaginative programme linked by folk music influences and musical landscape painting.
The recital opened with James Macmillan’s elegiac Memento, drawing on the Hebridean tradition of Gaelic psalm-singing. Evocative of desolate machair and cladach, it painted a picture of internal grief echoed in sympathy by the landscape. Plaintive mimicry of seabirds added to the effect. After an emotional outburst, a hushed meditative passage of modal harmonies recalled the Dankgesang from Beethoven’s Op. 132, with its promise of healing.
Haydn’s Op. 33 No. 5 in G is perhaps a lesser-played work, but it received a warm and committed outing. Everything that is special about chamber music playing was in evidence: frequent eye-contact between the players, mutually responsive phrasing, dynamic balance and a sense of shared understanding of and commitment to the music and each other, confirming the artistic maturity of this young group of musicians. The Scherzo, more Ländler than minuet, was Haydn in full rustic folk-music mode, the prim and elegant Trio providing a comic contrast. The skipping rhythm of the theme-and-variations finale continued the characteristic Haydn whimsy.
The violins swapped places to permit second violinist, Donald Grant, to introduce and lead his arrangement of a Gaelic lullaby associated with the poetess Sìleas na Ceapaich. Donald’s musical roots are in Scottish traditional fiddle music and the arrangement was hauntingly beautiful.
The composer Sally Beamish knew of Donald’s fiddle-playing before his chamber music, so when she was commissioned to write a work for the quartet, she decided to incorporate this rich musical tradition. Her Reed Stanzas, written on Harris, draws mostly on the pibroch style of lament. It was also introduced by Donald who then left the body of the kirk to commence playing offstage, slowly walking back to the front playing such a lament. The other instruments joined in with a set of variations. Despite the different musical language, this work had much in common with the Macmillan, with seabird-mimicry and musical coastal landscape-painting. A unison declamatory variation echoed the emotional outburst of Macmillan’s piece, before the mood returned to peaceful resignation.
The recital concluded with two more of Donald’s compositions. First, a new tune written for a birthday celebration, reel-like but with variations gradually increasing in tempo and the gradual infusion of a swing component to the metre. Finally, he introduced a musical portrait of a legendary ‘witch’ who, having cursed a doctor, retired to haunt the woods. Supposedly gazing into her blue eyes would turn one to stone. Audience participation was requested and rehearsed. The recital closed with audience and violinist repeatedly intoning “Hí-rí-ú; ‘n-gorm-shúil …” invoking “blue-eyes” morendo.
As a festival-opening ‘keynote’, this intriguing and engaging programme perfectly set time and place (albeit a different Scottish coast) and reminded those of us who love chamber music why we have missed hearing and seeing it live. If the perspicacious reader is anticipating a ‘but’, there is an admittedly subjective ‘druthers’ from this reviewer. The Elias Quartet have begun recording a complete Beethoven cycle. I would happily have traded the Macmillan and Beamish for hearing their interpretation of just one Beethoven quartet.