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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
August 8, 2017
Schumann's three string quartets Op.41 date from 1842, the same year he also composed his Piano Quintet Op.44 and the Piano Quartet Op.47. Dedicated to his friend Felix Mendelssohn and premiered as a gift to his wife Clara on her twenty-third birthday, the quartets are the only chamber pieces without piano that Schumann wrote.
The Dover Quartet, making their third appearance at the Victoria Summer Music Festival since bursting onto the scene in 2014, provided the audience with eloquent and thoughtful readings of the three Schumann quartets, running through them in numerical order (with an interval between Nos.2 and 3). There is a musical logic to this sequence; their key relationships, for one. But there is a programmatic logic, too; the first two are clearly modeled on Classical structures (Schumann had been studying the quartets of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven earlier in the year) and there is plenty of Bachian counterpoint. The third quartet is far more Romantic in nature, as if Schumann wanted to demonstrate his ability to craft quartets in the style of his predecessors before launching into something more uniquely his own, full of emotional twists and turns.
Throughout, the Dover Quartet demonstrated a sympathetic understanding of Schumann's music. The quirky rhythms that are sprinkled throughout the quartets were deftly handled, as were the piano-like arpeggios of the F major quartet's Scherzo movement. And striking too were the beautiful slow passages; I was particularly taken by the beauty the Dovers achieved in the bagpipe section of the first quartet's final movement and the tender opening statement of the theme of the second quartet's Andante, before the theme runs through a short cycle of variations.
Before writing this review, I went back to the Music In Victoria site to see what I'd written about the 2015 Dover Quartet concerts at the VSMF. And I was not surprised to see many of the same adjectives that I'd jotted in my notebook while listening to the Schumann appear in my earlier review: delightful, sympathetic to each other's playing, intensity, rich sound...you get the idea.
The Dover Quartet were this evening and have demonstrated themselves to be, quite simply, consistently terrific. The VSMF should be commended for bringing them back a third time in four years; don't pass up the opportunity to hear them if you get the chance.
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