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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
July 28, 2022
It can come of something of a surprise, over a century after his death, to realise just how controversial a composer Claude Debussy was during his lifetime.
In 1915, for instance, Camille Saint-Saëns wrote to Gabriel Fauré regarding En Blanc et Noir: "it is incredible, and the door of the Institut [de France] must at all costs be barred against a man capable of such atrocities".
Saint-Saëns got his wish.
Debussy's String Quartet in G minor is unique in several ways: firstly and most significantly, it was like no quartet which had gone before it and divided opinion on its first performance in 1893 — Dukas was impressed, Debussy's friend Chausson was deeply disappointed and told him so; it is also Debussy's sole essay in the medium, although he had planned a second quartet to placate Chausson, a work which never got beyond the planning stage, possibly due to the rupture in their friendship the following year — the traditional family man thoroughly disapproved of his friend's more relaxed approach to matters of the heart; finally, and perhaps most mysteriously, it is the only work to which Debussy assigned an opus number: 10.
It was with a quite exceptional account of Debussy's Op.10 that the Viano String Quartet concluded their splendid recital on Thursday evening, a concert which, despite the extreme heat and continuing pandemic was gratifyingly well attended.
The opening movement conveyed a tremendous sense of urgency, the playing intense, rich-hued and rhapsodic. The scherzo, that extraordinary blending of pizzicato and arco which Roger Nichols, in The New Grove, claims as "the earliest model for those quartet writers of the 20th century (Webern, Bartók) for whom timbre has assumed a dominant role" was dramatic, rhythmically vital and had a buoyant spring to its step.
I realised that I have probably previously not given the slow movement its full due: here, after the exquisite opening, the music was appropriately (given the weather) languid; although it became distinctly impassioned at times, the playing was never less than gorgeous and the final chord was impeccably lovely. The finale opened beautifully, with an irresistible accelerando leading to the exuberant, all-consuming main body of the movement.
In a word: outstanding.
There are those who maintain that the last numbered (although quite probably the first or second to be composed) of Beethoven's six Op.18 quartets is "relatively lightweight".
I suspect the Viano Quartet not to be of their number, certainly if the performance with which they opened their recital was any indicator.
For while there was much to commend in their playing — and I shall come to that in a moment — there were also several places where I felt their approach was rather too fierce: more fitting to the Op.59 "Razumovsky" quartets.
Of course the quartet are still (from my perspective, very) young and could always cite the I Ching — "Youthful folly leads to excess" — in extenuation (and, to be honest, I think "folly" too harsh a term).
Meanwhile, let us "accentuate the positive": their tone was extremely fine throughout (even in those fierce passages); the quartet's opening was crisp and lively, with plenty of momentum. They observed the first movement's exposition repeat, for which I was grateful, made a nicely subtle tenuto in the second subject and a wonderfully pregnant pause before the recapitulation.
The second movement was delightful, charming in the outer sections, distinctly misterioso in the central minor-key episode, with a marvellous sense of homecoming on the return to the major.
The scherzo was deliciously playful with plenty of drive, vivacious cross rhythms and a superb subito piano close. Beethoven directs that the slow opening to the finale, known as "La Malinconia" and perhaps the most forward-looking music in all six Op.18 quartets, should be played with the greatest delicacy ("Questo pezzo si deve trattare colla più gran delicatezza") and the hushed intensity of the Vianos' playing was riveting, although perhaps cheerfulness of the chirpy allegro which followed felt just a little too easily achieved.
Overall and despite my occasional cavils this was a very fine performance indeed. But I'd love to hear them perform it again in a decade or so.
Between the Beethoven and the Debussy came Matthew Whittall's Bright Ferment (String Quartet No.2), which dates from as recently as 2019.
The music made no attempt to disguise its episodic nature and during the course of its fairly brief (nine minutes or so) duration the music ranged from the dramatically propulsive (with distinct hints of Bernard Hermann's score to Hitchcock's Psycho) to the lushly romantic. The episodic nature was both good and bad: good, because if one was not enjoying a particular section, another would soon come along in its stead; bad, because if one was especially enjoying a particular section, another would soon come along in its stead...
The Vianos played this music to the hilt, displaying a terrific range of tone colours and rhythmic verve.
For their well-deserved encore, the quartet gave us Jessie Montgomery's Strum, a virtuosic, energetic piece with distinctly hoedown-like tendencies. It was superbly played, but for me, despite the excellence of the playing, it slightly outstayed its welcome.
A superlative opening to the first Victoria Summer Music Festival in living memory (OK, I exaggerate, but I suspect you know what I mean).
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