MiV Home
Phillip T Young Recital Hall
August 1, 2008
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, an iconoclast is one who "attacks cherished beliefs". Friday's final concert of the 2008 Victoria Summer Music Festival, featuring the Borealis String Quartet, was as iconoclastic an evening as I can recall.
The programme opened with Beethoven's Op.95 quartet, a remarkable work - as are several of the productions of a period which is both chronologically and stylistically somewhere between middle and late Beethoven.
And it opened with a bang; the playing of the quartet was in many ways quite stunning: technically superb, with razor-sharp ensemble, excellent balance and a clear unanimity of approach.
But this approach is where the problems, for me, began. Many commentators have written about anger and violence in Beethoven's opening theme, but in the Borealis's hands the word that first came to mind was "brutality": this was not so much Fate knocking at the door as Fate kicking in the door and letting fly with an Uzi.
It would be pointless to go into every last detail, but throughout the performance - in fact throughout the evening - every note seemed to be played with the maximum possible intensity, dynamics were exaggerated and, with the exception of a few commendably lyrical slow passages, such as the opening of the second movement, the music was ultimately fatiguing to listen to - as if the players were shouting constantly.
Beethoven's last quartet, Op.135, followed and the same strictures largely apply. One is used to the notion of the structure of the late Beethoven quartets being something which is almost, but not quite, beyond the grasp of the listener; here, however, the feeling was more of a series of highly-contrasted passages with little, if any, architectural glue binding them together.
Again there was much to admire in the playing itself, such as the buoyancy of the second movement vivace; yet here again, the aggression in the trio produced an accelerando that nearly got away from the players and was, at the very least, rhythmically unstable.
As one regular concertgoer put it to me at the interval, "that was not my idea of Beethoven."
Nor, I suspect - and more's the pity - was it Beethoven's. Less deconstruction than demolition.
The Guild of Critics mandates that no review of late Brahms, especially the Clarinet Quintet, shall be written without using the a-word on at least one occasion.
I shall satisfy the requirement immediately, by observing that Friday's performance of the quintet was the least autumnal I have ever heard.
Perhaps it was the presence of clarinetist Patricia Kostek - whom I first heard playing this music some fifteen years ago - or perhaps it was the generally mellower tone of the Brahms, but there was certainly more lyricism to the playing than we had heard on the Beethoven.
The third movement - typically more intermezzo than scherzo - was the best of all, with a lively and deftly-handled trio. Elsewhere, though, the music was overlit, overintense, even strident.
Certainly the cliché of autumnal nostalgia can be overdone in late Brahms, but to eliminate it altogether is surely not appropriate.
There is no doubt in my mind that the four members of the Borealis Quartet are extremely talented musicians and I have no problem with their apparent desire to take the "road less travelled". But in their eagerness so to do, they seem to have veered off the road altogether.
Nevertheless, it was undeniably an interesting evening.
MiV Home