Beethoven, Ravel, Louie, Shostakovich: Vogler Quartet, Ian Parker (piano), Artspring, Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, Canada, 06.11.2006 (MB)

 

 

This near-faultless recital, given by the Berlin based Vogler Quartet and their guest pianist, the Canadian Ian Parker, would not have been a disappointment in any of the world’s leading chamber venues. That it should have been heard on a remote rain-soaked island, with its pianist having arrived from Honolulu that afternoon, made it seem all the more remarkable.

With its dual themes of Russia, heard in the third of Beethoven’s “Razumovsky” quartets and Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet, interlaced with the fairy-tale fantasy of Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit and Alexina Louie’s “Memories in an Ancient Garden”, the recital risked losing focus. That it didn’t was because both the Vogler’s and Parker gave this music uncommon freshness.

The Op.59, No.3 Quartet was given an epic performance, but not one that seemed comfortable as an allegory on Beethoven’s deafness, as it has been viewed. From the beginning, the Vogler’s seemed to see this entire quartet as symbolic of Beethoven’s defiance: the first violinist’s sheer vigour in the opening movement became a mirror of the cellist’s sustained pizzicato in the second and the minuet evoked the spirit of struggle, not of dance. This approach embraced both the ambiguity of forward-looking tonality and the joyous simplicity of a Mozartean past, albeit a more fiery one.

If the Beethoven had alluded to physical struggles of one kind, Gaspard de la Nuit looks at different ones. Ravel wrote it in response to Balakirev’s Islamey and its virtuosity demands much from a pianist. Parker made the three movements almost sound too easy, but that masqueraded uncommon keyboard touch throughout. “Ondine” sparkled like the water fairy it depicts, seducing her onlooker, notes cascading across the keyboard. In “Le Gibet” the tolling bell of a man being hanged in the distance is evoked through the sustained repetition of a B flat octave and it was Parker’s achievement to make this sound menacing and not simply repetitive, prefacing the blistering repeats of the final movement, “Scarbo”, whose transcendental difficulties Parker negotiated with an eye firmly trained on musicality.

Opening the second half with Alexina Louie’s “Memories in an Ancient Garden” from her Scenes from a Jade Terrace was a risk that paid off. Although the piano is not prepared á la John Cage, this slight movement does call for the use of harmonics and Parker conjured up an evocative sound world by thrumming and plucking the strings of the instrument whilst simultaneously maintaining the more usual soundscape from the piano; black and white keys come to symbolize the opposites of loudness and quietness, the instrument’s lower range depicting darkness, its upper range a Chinese fantasy world. Parker made this music shimmer like intoxicated blossom.

Which was a world away from the final work on this programme, Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet in G minor, written during the Second World War, and reflecting this composer’s proximity to historical events. The Quintet only begins to touch on the desolation Shostakovich was to achieve in his late string quartets, but both the Vogler Quartet and Ian Parker brought an intensity of expression to this performance that was enthralling. Perhaps the second movement Fugue sounded less lyrical than it should, and perhaps Parker didn’t quite bring enough terror to the Finale’s thunderous and crushing chords, but this was music-making that fired on all pistons. In turns, it was dramatic and impulsive, a fitting conclusion to a recital that had given a capacity audience music-making of the highest quality.

 

 

Marc Bridle

 

 

This review was originally published in The Driftwood.