Concert Chamber
Review: Heath Lees
Last Wednesday, listening to these four players begin the very last quartet of their six-concert, all-Beethoven festival, you had to admire the gleaming, smoothly oiled ensemble they had become.
Like the unfolding partnership of a dance, each instrument breathed its way in after every four bars, creating the very best chamber music experience by contributing strong, individual character yet yielding gracefully to the combined musical personality of the group.
The NZSQ had chosen the C-sharp minor op.131 as their final work, a huge, seven-movement affair that calls for some of the most exacting playing of all the quartets. It was a doubly difficult challenge, since the first half of the concert had already been expanded to the nth degree by the monumental weight of the Grosse Fuge as the (original) finale to the mighty B-flat op.130 quartet.
No wonder the audience marked the end of the concert - and the series - with a standing ovation.
Two days earlier, the programme had contained another final appearance - the last of the set of op.18 quartets which have kept us such genial company by opening most of these concerts.
Of the many revelations in this series, the awareness of the huge distance that Beethoven covered throughout this op.18 set was itself worth the price of the subscription. It has been a rewarding experience to chart the breathtaking leaps that he took between the sociable "galanterie" of the earliest of the set, to the latest, this broad and prophetic work in B-flat.
And the NZSQ showed a similar maturity by their confident, utterly musical handling of all its features: the artful threading up of contrapuntal areas with block harmonies, the wistful melancholy with which even the giddy parts are shot through, and the difficult syncopations at speed, most obviously in the scherzo.
The crowning achievement of Beethoven's string quartets is the musical language of his last quartets - monumental yet intimate; outwardly eccentric, yet creating inwardly their own rules of form and providing an absorbing listening "adventure."
The two late quartets in Monday's programme showed all of this to perfection. The joco-serious "Muss es sein?" of op.135 is preceded by a movement that anticipates Mahler in its warm intensity, and produced possibly the most beautiful playing in a series that has been distinguished by its musical understanding and technical maturity.
<i>Performance:</i>The New Zealand String Quartet's Beethoven Series
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