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Swansea Festival 2008 (2) :  Mozart, Hoddinott, Janácek, Beethoven,  Endellion Quartet; Andrew Watkinson, Ralph de Souza (violin), Garfield Jackson (viola), David Waterman (cello), Brangwyn Hall, Swansea, 7.10.2008 (GPu)

Mozart, String Quartet, K 465 (Dissonance)
Hoddinott, Scena for String Quartet, Op.100 No. 1
Janácek, String Quartet, No. 1 (Kreutzer)
Beethoven, String Quartet in E minor, Op.59 No.2 (Razumovsky)


The Endellion Quartet are amongst the finest and best-known of British quartets; yet, remarkably, this was their first ever performance in Swansea in the thirty years since their foundation. Though one would certainly not have chosen to wait so long for a first appearance, when it arrived it certainly rewarded the wait. Displaying near-perfection of ensemble and balance, they presented, before an enthusiastic audience, a fascinating programme that ranged widely in manner and emotion.

Mozart’s Quartet in C major, K 465, generally known as ‘The Dissonance’, made a splendid opening, a work both adventurous and challenging and, on the other hand, with such a sense of inner inevitability that it always seems paradoxically reassuring. The harmonic language of the first theme in the Adagio introduction, with its vertical dissonances, with the first violin introducing false relations with the viola, generates a kind of tension which (as was certainly the case in this performance) yet seems to contain promises of release and efflorescence, as its sinuous canonic imitation above a pulsing cello is both ‘incorrect’ and yet utterly symmetrical. The effect was very well caught in this performance; even the dissonances had a poise about them, a poise elevated to still grander heights in the ensuing allegro, now settled into C major, with rising arpeggios in the cello which then become a theme in themselves. The whole had about it a kind of aural geometry which was both sturdily solid and sublime. The Andante which followed was genuinely ‘cantabile’, the first violin of Andrew Watkinson gorgeous in tone and fluent in line, the cello of David Waterman providing an eloquent, undulating pulse. The Menuetto’s vitality was a delight, beautifully accented in the opening bars, and the later unison melodic writing was quite without the stiffness that can sometimes infect it – this long established quartet’s familiarity and coherence were very much in evidence here, as they were in the ease and conviction of the contrapuntal interplay of voices. There was a certainty and confidence – but never complacency – about the playing which were to be among the hallmarks of the whole programme. In the finale, the sophistication of Mozart’s writing, both melodically and harmonically, sustained up to the final canon, was exhilaratingly captured. Andrew Watkinson’s role as leader was everywhere evident, without his being excessively dominant; indeed one of the particular pleasures of listening to the quartet was the complementarity, the intimacy of aural relationship, of Watkinson and second violin Ralph de Souza.

Alan Hoddinott’s Scena was prefaced by a story from Andrew Watkinson, who recounted how they had been one of twenty quartets at the Portsmouth String Quartet Competition of April 1979 who were obliged to learn this then newly written ‘test-piece’ by Alan Hoddinott. As Watkinson admitted, a piece first learned in the intense heat of a competition is not likely to endear itself to a quartet. They didn’t play it gain after the competition – until it was suggested that they play it at this concert when, in rehearsing it, they discovered it was really rather good. And it was! (It may be worth recording that the 1979 competition was won by the Takacs Quartet – with the Endellion Quartet taking second place and also the Audience Prize). Scena is in five sections, played continuously. A quasi-improvisatory opening is succeeded by an intense and agitated scherzo, busy with cross rhythms. A restatement of the opening section is this time succeeded by a serene adagio before the work closes with a hectic coda in 6/8. Though there are certainly some tests of technique (tests which the Endellion Quartet passed with flying colours – in 2008 at any rate!) Scena is far more than just a ‘test-piece’. It is a real piece of music, with some haunting moments, some abrupt contrasts of emotion and an impressive economy of means in which nothing is wasted or pointlessly reiterated. This was a performance that put a persuasive case for the music – a powerful suggestion that it deserves a good many more performances.

Janácek’s First Quartet is one of those works which, however much one admires it, is not to be listened to too often. It is too disturbing for that. Milan Kundera once wrote of Janácek’s last decade as “a Picasso-like old age”. He was thinking both of Janácek’s continuing – and startling – musical inventiveness and of the composer’s being loved by a younger woman. The First Quartet of 1923 (written five years before Janácek’s death) is Picasso-like in another way too. As cellist David Waterman said, in introducing the work, it operates almost like a collage, or a crisply edited film; it juxtaposes melodic and rhythmic fragments, seeming to come at the elements of Tolstoy’s story from a multitude of angles (sometimes more than one more or less simultaneously); Picasso-like it quotes (from Beethoven’s Kreuzer Sonata) and develops the material it quotes; it employs pastiches (there are obvious precedents for this in Picasso too) of established forms, as in the oblique polka which governs the second movement. This remarkable quartet got a performance of great intensity, of an almost-exhausting emotional weight, from the Endellion Quartet. They handled the sudden transitions of mood and style – perhaps especially in that second movement – with deceptive ease, articulating much of the work’s troubling power. They revelled (but never self-indulgently) in the way Janácek passes motifs from instrument to instrument and in his shifting and uncertain perspectives. Which voice are we hearing? Jealous husband, wife or lover? Whose is that hysteria? Whose is that troubled intimacy? The whole quartet is an object lesson in the freedoms and ambiguities more readily available (Picasso-like) in the visual arts or (Janácek-like) in music than in the stricter denotative forms of literature. It would be redundant to detail the particular excellencies of this performance; suffice it to say that the Endellion Quartet did something like full justice to one of the most remarkable quartets of the first half of the twentieth century. It is though, worth pausing to single out the contribution of viola-player Garfield Jackson – if only because (ignoring the jokes) viola players tend to be ignored. His contribution to the building momentum as we approached breaking-point in the last movement was fundamental; his judgement of dynamics was consistently perfect.

After a necessary interval – a compelling performance of Janácek’s First Quartet necessitates a break for audience, let alone performers – the Endellion Quartet closed the programme with a performance of the second of Beethoven’s three Opus 59 Razumovsky Quartets, that in E minor. The keystone of any performance of this quartet, surely, is the second, slow movement (‘Molto adagio’). We have statements both by Beethoven’s friend Carl Holz and his pupil Carl Czerny to the effect (the words are Czerny’s) that the ‘inspiration’ for this movement “occurred to him when contemplating the starry sky and thinking of the music of the spheres”. It is a remarkable movement, the romantic sublime at its purest, with hymn-like music that anticipates the ‘Heiliger Dankgesang’ of Opus 132 (String Quartet No.15). In its evocation of a cosmic world almost free of merely human-earthly emotion this adagio achieves a kind of visionary sidereal elegance and grandeur; the problem is to integrate the movement within the quartet as a whole. The inhuman passion of this second movement (there is a line in Abraham Cowley’s poems that speaks of being “rapt above the reach of thought” which seems to sum up this movement) can sit rather awkwardly after the very human passions and turbulence of the first movement, and before the lively dance rhythms and folk-song echoes of the succeeding allegretto. This performance by the Endellion Quartet certainly came as close as most to integrating the three movements. Their sublimation of the dance patterns of the Allegretto effected a continuity with what had gone before; in the opening of the Adagio there was a degree of ‘human’ tentativeness – enough, perhaps, to persuade one that what followed grew, plausibly, out of human fallibility. The Presto which closes this quartet offers fewer problems: the closing movement has a Haydenesque good humour and tolerance that seems to put to one side the complications previously raised, in a largely high-spirited, untroubled rush to finality. The Endellions Quartet’s reading of this last movement found means to acknowledge its sense of fun while giving it enough gravity to (more or less) counterpoise what had gone before (if it didn’t quite do so, the fault was Beethoven’s, not theirs).

This was a concert which stimulated many thoughts about the continuities and discontinuities of the string quartet tradition, while engaging a wide range of emotions. I, for one, hope that Swansea won’t wait another thirty years for the next performance from this outstanding quartet.

Glyn Pursglove


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