Theme and Variations

Sometimes I find that weeks or days seem to be shaped by a particular theme, often for no apparent reason. Slipping back in time for a brief moment, last Monday's theme was most definitely the "String Quartet". Against the background of news from my old home, King's College, that their newly instated quartet in residence, the Dante Quartet, had been awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society's Chamber Music Award came two wonderful (and wonderfully different) quartet concerts in my current home. First up was the Quatuor Leonis's long awaited (well, by me at least) lunchtime performance of Schubert's Death and the Maiden Quartet. The intense moods conjured by this masterpiece never fail to astound: throughout a turbulent wildness seems to bubble beneath the surface, and because often restrained by the repetition of rhythmic motifs, a sense of real emotional depth and power is created (Think of the cumulative effect of the melodic reticence, harmonic pacing and rhythmic insistence of the second movement Theme and Variations). Hot on the heels of this concert came that of another French string quartet, the internationally known Quatuor Ysaÿe. Given in Lyon's auditorium as part of a wider series of concerts entitled "Les Grands Interprètes" which has welcomed a range of artists including Alfred Brendel (and I would have to be in England for that concert!), the twenty-three year old quartet performed Haydn's "Seven Last Words of Christ from the Cross". Not the easiest of musical worlds to enter into (Haydn himself confessed that "it was no easy task to compose seven adagios lasting ten minutes each, and to succeed one another without fatiguing the listeners; indeed, I found it quite impossible to confine myself to the appointed limits", the work combines spoken texts (performed here by the intriguing French philosopher Michel Serres) with music (originally for orchestra, then transcribed for string quartet). Despite the incongruous setting of a vast contemporary concert hall, the combination of the exquisitely articulated sonorities of French with the mellifluous string sonority of the quartet seemed to match the meditative aim of the work. And funnily enough, in a neat tying up of loose ends, because after all writing lets you tie up the loose ends that life can't, it turns out that the Quatuor Leonis are often coached/mentored by the Quatuor Ysaÿe, and that the last work performed by the Dante Quartet in King's was none other than Haydn's "Seven Last Words".