Technically accomplished but somewhat detached, the Fitzwilliam quartet were probably at their best in this concert when navigating the forbidding wastes of Shostakovich’s 15th Quartet. I’ve always found this composer hard to get to grips with but the group provided a thoughtful interpretation and, while it still hasn’t made me into someone who’s going to embrace him wholeheartedly, it certainly gave me some new things to think about.
This piece is stuffed with unusual effects, with players providing percussion by striking their bow against the instrument, or scraping their bow across the strings so lightly that the melody is buried in a metallic howl. Shostakovich wrote this work in 1970; he was ageing, ailing and much worried by the closeness of death, and the group’s chilly, energetic interpretation of a piece, filled with neurotic little gestures and distorted melodies, brought this out powerfully.
By that token, opening with Tchaikovsky’s B Flat Quartet wasn’t a good fit for the mood of the evening, or of the players, and it was an odd choice to open on. Well-known and, by all accounts much-loved, it’s got all of the composer’s virtues and all of his faults, and really needs to be played with a shameless acceptance that this is romanticism in the musical and the emotional sense of the word. You need, in short, to swoon over this sort of thing, and the Fitzwilliam Quartet did not seem the types to swoon, giving us a performance somewhat lacking in affect.
They did rather better with Delius’ Late Swallows. This lovely miniature, apparently inspired by the songs of workers in his father’s California orange groves, is an odd little delight. Like a lot of English work of the early 20th century, it works its way towards some of the newer harmonies coming out of both the folk and jazz worlds, and the group gave it the rich treatment it deserved, clearly feeling an affinity for its structural exploration.
The whole of the second half was taken up by Sibelius’ Voces Intimae – a lengthy piece that was the only major quartet the composer wrote and which, while somewhat infused with the Finnish traditional themes that delighted him, is for the most part an expression of his continued affiliation with a lush Romantic style in the teeth of an increasingly austere modernism. It’s a technically impressive piece, particularly in the final movement – the quartet playing at speed in unison and then splitting off into a high-density labyrinth of shifting chords. Its structure and intensity seemed to give the Quartet a much-needed boost of emotional intensity, finishing the concert on a very definite high.