Concert Chamber, Auckland
Review: Heath Lees
This series gets better with each concert. Last Wednesday's showing - the fourth of six - proved that their Beethoven marathon is now drawing the best out of these young, home-based musicians.
Following cellist Rolf Gjelsten's promise of "a night of contrasts," there appeared two very different works from the early Op.18 set, perfectly illustrating the poles of Beethoven's musical world, with the C-minor (No. 4) clothed in serious and forceful tones, and the A-major (No. 5), appearing in elegant Mozartian garb.
Showing they meant business, the quartet launched into the earlier quartet with urgent intensity to the interweaving lines, and beefy muscle for the slicing chords and energising accents.
Sometimes the intonation splayed out a bit over the edges of the notes, but it was all in a good dramatic cause. Besides, it made it even more satisfying to savour the players' supreme delicacy in the lighter moments, as in the elfin parts of the C-minor's minuet, and the polished exchanges of courtesies that pervade the A-major work.
Neither of these quartets has a broad, slow movement. But the concert's second half contained the mother and father of all slow movements in the cavatina of the great Op.130 quartet, probably the noblest song for strings ever written, and containing the famous beklemmt direction ("choked") for some of its passionate melody. Despite its notorious complexity, the Op.130 is a liberating work, since the audience is freed from paying attention to the set forms of the day, and settles for just being swept along by Beethoven's powerful music.
Earlier in the week, the NZSQ had first dipped their toes into the deep pool of the late quartets by including the Op.127 in E-flat as the centrepiece to their Monday concert.
Endowed with the most sonorous opening of all the quartets, this gateway to the composer's mature style signals an expansion of Beethoven's melodic lines that includes a new, rough-edged counterpoint, yet is complemented by a deep feeling for song and expressive unity.
The spellbinding adagio of the second movement brought the best playing of the evening, with an impressive command of Beethoven's continuously developing variations, and perfectly framed dialogues, especially between first violin and cello.
Later, in the third Ruzumovsky quartet, the inner voices rose to the fore in their passionate contributions, while the finale displayed Helene Pohl's virtuosity in the tiny E-natural/E-flat distinctions that Beethoven demands throughout its whirlwind course.
The quartet completes the series tonight and Wednesday.
<i>Performance:</i> The New Zealand String Quartet's Beethoven Series
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