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Swansea Festival 2: Haydn, Bartok, Beethoven Allegri Quartet: Ofer Falk, Rafael Todes (violin),Dorothea Vogel (violin), Pat Banda (cello). Brangwyn Hall, Swansea, 13.10.2007 (GPu)

Haydn String Quartet in A, Op. 20 No.6

Bartok String Quartet No. 6

Beethoven String Quartet in C, Op. 59 No.3

Not long ago I was rereading Robin Daniels’s Conversations with Menuhin (1979). On my way home after this concert given by the current, fairly youthful, incarnation of the Allegri Quartet (50 years old in 2004) a passage from the book was very much in my mind and I got it off the shelves to check it:

“RD: Do you regard chamber music – and especially the string quartet – as the highest form of musical activity?

YM: Yes, I do. The independence and interdependence of each line; the subtlety of inflection and of the emotions expressed; the restraint, the economy of instrumental resources – a quartet can convey so much more than a huge orchestra with a battery of brass, producing an ear-splitting volume of sound, each composer trying to outdo the other in decibel strength …

RD: The glory of the string quartet is derived not only from its compactness but from the number four being symbolic of wholeness.

YM: Yes. A string quartet covers more or less the range and divisions of the human voice, male and female. It can express the deepest and most sensitive of human emotions. It can speak of eternal truths. … I am not decrying the great works written for orchestra, but I am in no doubt that the string quartet, in which each player has total responsibility for his part, is a more subtle and evolved form of communication”.

The Allegri’s well-chosen and well-executed programme was a delightful demonstration of many of the virtues adumbrated above – wholeness, restraint, economy, reflection of the range of the human voice, the deepest and most sensitive of human emotions.

Throughout the ensemble playing was impeccable, but without ever feeling over-regimented as it can with some modern quartets. The sense of conversation, of equal voices expressing their views on a common theme or situation was everywhere apparent. The instrumental balance was a joy in itself; but like everything else it existed to serve the music not as a shiny-surfaced end in itself.

They began their programme with the last of Haydn’s six opus 20 quartets, originally published in 1774 as Six Divertimentos. As that title may suggest, they owe much to the mannerisms of the gallant style, but they fuse this with a weight of thought and emotion which were increasingly to become the hallmarks of Haydn’s quartets. In terms of Haydn’s development as a writer of string quartets – which is to say in the development of the string quartet per se – these opus 20 quartets are works of great importance. The Allegri’s performance was properly lyrical, not least in the extended aria of the adagio, in which grace was complemented by hints of darker emotions. Throughout the Allegri played with a delightful clarity of line and, without any sense of forcing, their presentation of the contrasts between movements was apt and telling. The third movement menuet and trio was particularly lovely, the slow and almost fragmentary tentativeness of the opening burgeoning with an air of great naturalness into lucid melody and harmony. Perhaps the three-voiced fugue of the final allegro didn’t quite succeed in fusing fugal correctness with the figures of a quasi-peasant dance as the most outstanding performances of the movement do, but that is only to quibble at what was a fine opening to their programme.

Earlyish Haydn was followed by the very different world of Bartok’s last quartet. Though it is a work whose meaning is in no way limited by the circumstances of its composition, it is hard to forget that it was written in the months of his mother’s final illness. Bartok’s mother died in December 1939. The writing of the quartet began in August 1939 and completed in November of that year. Of course, Bartok had more than family distress to worry about at such a time. With the rise of fascism in Hungary, the Bartoks planned to emigrate and left for America the following year, before any performance of the quartet could be given in Hungary.

The Allegri’s reading of the quartet was not as dramatic, not as wildly expressive as some that I have heard. There was, rather, a marked degree of restraint to their performance which elucidated Bartok’s argument perfectly. The motto-theme of the quartet, marked mesto (sad) is mournful, but dignified, soaked in the inflexions of Magyar music but, at the same time, classically ‘correct’. Its first statement by the viola of Dorothea Vogel was heart-rending in its balance of the suffering and the stoic. When the theme begins the second movement, its statement in a two-part counterpoint, voiced by the cello and commented on by the higher strings showed the Allegri’s ensemble work at its very best. When the “mesto” theme returns at the beginning of the third movement there is a feeling of inescapability about it. The bitter irony of the ‘march’ in the second movement seems to have led only to a kind of comically excessive gypsy-pathos; nor will the burletta of the third movement do more than comment on the futility of struggle to escape sadness, leading to a somewhat manic quality in the recognition of the triviality of the offered alternatives. When, then, the “mesto” motif  returns at the beginning of the final movement, there is no further attempt to run away from it, as it were. The three previous movements carry, respectively, the designations “Mesto - Vivace”, “Mesto - Marcia” and “Mesto – Burletta-moderato”; the final movement is, with stark simplicity, marked just “Mesto”. The “mesto” motif now becomes the generative stuff of the entire movement and there is a degree of resignation (but no signs of self-pity) in its acceptance and, indeed, in its elaboration. Moments of (pretend?) happiness from the earlier vivace are recalled, but now subsumed in the all-encompassing sense of poignancy. The Allegri’s quite outstanding reading of the quartet resisted all temptation to melodrama, even in the rather sinister tremelo chords on the last page of the finale; instead they presented with enormous clarity, a clarity  that made it all the more moving, Bartok’s musical argument, in a performance which had great innerness and, to repeat a word used earlier, wholeness.

The Bartok, for me, was the highlight of the evening, but an assured performance of the third of Beethoven’s Razumovsky quartets was also richly enjoyable. The harmonically unexpected opening was played with hushed tension, and even for listeners familiar with the music, there was a quality both of release and of almost impudent surprise when the allegro vivace burst out. The transition from near stasis to gratifying fluidity was handled in delightful fashion. Having just been listening to Bartok, the eastern European quality of some of the music that makes up the second movement, a kind of idealised archetype of folk melody, was particularly striking. If that was one case of intertextuality evident in the Allegri’s well-designed programme, another existed in the exuberant Fugal finale (actually a blend of sonata and fugue) reminiscent of Haydn’s use of fugal devices in the finale of the quartet which began the programme.

The Allegri’s Beethoven – and not only that – was played with an absolute lucidity which never became merely clinical; that lucidity is perhaps a function of the perfect instrumental balance they achieved in this concert. I don’t think I have ever noticed before just how superb the writing for viola is in Bartok’s sixth quartet. That I did so on this occasion was not because Dorothea Vogel forced herself disproportionately on the listener’s attention. Just the opposite, in fact. It was the perfection of instrumental balance that allowed one to hear all four voices with utter clarity.

When I hear a really good string quartet I am sometimes tempted toward the heretical belief (implicit in some of Menuhin’s remarks quoted earlier) that we might safely dispense with all those orchestras and singers – that this is the only music we need. This was one of those nights.

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