Janácek : String Quartet No. 2 "Intimate Letters"
Smetana : String Quartet No. 1 "From my Life"
Dvorák : String Quartet No. 10 "Slavonic"
Bennewitz Quartet
I've rarely come across as clear an example of the exigencies of concert programming as tonight. It's extremely rare to find Janácek's "Intimate Letters" quartet at the start of a programme. The piece is so searingly intense and emotionally complex, putting anything after it is something of a challenge, and it was obvious that putting it first provided a different sort of challenge, of jumping in at the deep end, so to speak. Yet here we were, with the Janácek first; I suspect that either the Quartet or the organisers (or both) reckoned that of the three pieces, it was likely to be the least familiar, and the most difficult for the audience. Janácek is still not all that widely performed in France, and if the Smetana is probably not much better known, its musical idiom is less exigent on the innocent ear.
It was therefore not an injudicious choice, but the performance never really caught fire. The Quartet came to the piece cold, with no sort of springboard from which to reach further into the music's ardour. Although there were fine moments of great focus, the breaks between the segments were too pronounced, interrupting the flow more than necessary. I think, perhaps, they were letting the resonance die fully at the end of any given chord, but the acoustics in the church probably changed slightly with the presence of an audience (as opposed to during rehearsal) and they overestimated the actual duration of sound in performance. This was, in fact, a recurring issue throughout the concert, and particularly affected the outer works.
On the other hand, the Smetana certainly benefitted from the heightened emotional quotient induced by the Janácek. This was an excellent performance, impassioned, eager, vibrant. The Quartet's tendency to very fluid timing, with a lot of give and take (for which I would need the scores in order to be convinced of its complete justification) was at its least troublesome here, the ebb and flow well integrated into the musical argument, and their rich sound particularly apt for this almost operatic music.
With the Dvorák, however, I was again bothered by the very calculated accelerations and decelerations, and would have liked a little more metrical precision because the structure seemed to be slightly blurred. Again, there were some very strong moments, but as a whole it was less convincing than the Smetana. (Interestingly, the two works are almost contemporary, and Dvorák was the viola player at the first performance of the Smetana.) It is, certainly, always interesting to hear a Czech quartet in their own music, but this particular group needs to develop a greater sense of spontaneity for greater effectiveness.
[Next : 10th September]
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