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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
August 10 & 11, 2015
Many lofty things have been said about string quartets, not the least of which is the oft-quoted (on these pages, no less) statement by the English conductor Jeffrey Tate, "The most perfect expression of human behaviour is a string quartet". Hyperbole aside, it is true that many great string quartets have been composed in the 250 years since Haydn first established the form in the 1760s, and the breadth and depth of the genre is a testament to human imagination.
Or perhaps Tate was reflecting not on the form, but upon the ensemble. The groups that specialize in the performance of string quartets tend to have long careers - as one example, the four members of the Amadeus Quartet played together for forty years, and they only called it quits when one of the members of the group, violist Peter Schidlof, passed away.
But to completely realize Tate's conclusion we need both: great compositions AND high-calibre performers. In this pair of concerts, the members of the Dover Quartet gave us both.
The Monday evening concert, the first of the pair, featured works for string quartet alone, while on Tuesday evening the Dovers were joined by other musicians for the performances of a quintet and a sextet. The programs formed a symmetrical arc, with pieces that captured the composer's impressions of a foreign land bookending the two concerts. In between - the end of the first concert and the beginning of the second - we heard introverted Shostakovich works.
The first concert opened with Hugo Wolf's delightful Italian Serenade, a short work more often heard as a string quartet encore and in its orchestral guise.
This was followed by a delightful reading of the justifiably popular "American" quartet by Dvorak, Op.96. The quartet were wonderfully sympathetic to each other's playing, collectively producing a beautifully lush tone in the Lento second movement.
Shostakovich composed the A Major string quartet Op.68 in 1944, roughly mid-way through his career, but it was only the second of the fifteen quartets that he wrote. Again, the ensemble playing of the Dover Quartet allowed the performers to demonstrate the quality of the writing. Shostakovich's inward-looking music requires an intensity of performance, one that seemed natural for the Dovers. The spellbinding performance of the slow Recitative second movement held the audience transfixed, while the unrelenting melancholy of the final movement captured the audience's attention with its physical and emotional energy.
The second concert started with Shostakovich's Piano Quintet Op.57 (in G Minor), written in 1940, when Shostakovich was firmly in favour with the taste-makers in the Kremlin. Although full of the same emotional intensity as the second quartet, the presence of Arthur Rowe's piano seemed to open up the conversation; no longer four voices inside the same head, the quintet was more like five like-minded individuals in the same room. This was the case even in the fugal second movement and the achingly sad Intermezzo, but it really stood out in the sardonic humour of the Scherzo (everybody gets this joke) and the Finale.
After the interval, the Quartet was joined by violist David Harding and cellist Ariel Barnes for a rather rousing performance of Tchaikovsky's Souvenir de Florence (Opus 70 in his canon). This piece, like the Wolf serenade that opened the concert, is a traveller's diary of a trip to Italy, and like the Dvorak "American" quartet is full of melodic charm.
Again, the players produced a lovely rich sound, with the other two performers slotting seamlessly alongside the Dover Quartet. All six took obvious delight in playing together, both in the expressions on their faces and the quality of the performance.
Performing by themselves, the Dover Quartet exemplified top-notch ensemble playing, achieving a singularity of tone and purpose. And they clearly enjoyed performing with other virtuoso chamber players.
The Victoria Summer Music Festival organizers deserve two commendations. (Full disclosure: I served on the board of the Festival up to March 2015). The first is for bringing the Dover Quartet back to Victoria a year after their well-regarded debut in the city at the 2014 festival. The second for matching them with other players of similar calibre and giving them the stage for not one but two evenings of high-quality music.
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