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Emily Carr House
August 21, 2014
"The most perfect expression of human behaviour is a string quartet".
The sentiment is that of the conductor Jeffrey Tate, but I imagine that everybody present at Thursday's performance by the Emily Carr Quartet at their namesake's birthplace (all thirteen of us) would have agreed. I can imagine no more enjoyable way of spending time on a sunny summer's afternoon.
Emily Carr apparently had a great fondness for and interest in birds and her journals contain many descriptions of them and their behaviour.
Joseph Haydn's quartet Op.33 No.3 is known as the "Bird" either because of the chirping grace notes of the first violin in the opening movement, or because of the second movement's trio, a birdsong duet between the two violins.
The most obvious attribute of the performance was its sheer physicality - and how could it have been otherwise when the performers are almost sitting in the laps of the audience? (One lady needed to move when the quartet took their seats; if she hadn't she would have been in real danger of being - quite literally - elbowed out of the way by cellist Alasdair Money.)
Although the proximity of the performers was a major feature of the concert, I can think of ensembles whom one would rather listen to from a (considerable) distance. This most emphatically does not apply to the Emily Carrs, whose intonation and ensemble are immaculate and whose Haydn once more struck me as being about as close to perfection as I am ever likely to hear.
The rather strange second movement, with its lugubrious and, in this instance, rich-hued outer sections framing that violin duet of either real or imitation birdsong is something of a puzzle: the puzzle being that that it is marked "scherzando" yet seems notably deficient in humourous passages.
Or perhaps that is the joke. Haydn could be as subtle as the next composer when it came to wit.
The slow movement was simply lovely and the finale was, appropriately, as light as a feather: spritely and energetic but not once even coming close to being over-driven. Marvellous.
Tobin Stokes's Feathers consists of nine short movements. Each was preceded in the performance (as indeed were the movements of the Haydn) by a short avian reading from Emily's journals (in the case of the Stokes I believe these quotations are in the score).
The logistics of having a separate speaker would have been virtually impossible and so violist Mieka Michaux did the readings, and did so with such affection and feeling that actually having a separate speaker would have seemed entirely superfluous.
Stokes's music is attractive and atmospheric and was exquisitely performed. I loved the angular pizzicatos and lumbering cello of Turkeys, the rather touching Sanatorium with its gorgeous viola and cello opening, the uneasy Freedom (the reading told of a bird's losing its leg in the struggle to free itself of an entanglement), the disorienting glissando pizzicatos of the (rather noisy) hummingbirds - and much more. A fine piece of sound painting.
To reiterate: a simply wonderful musical interlude on a summer's afternoon.
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