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Haydn, Robin Holloway, Beethoven: Sacconi String Quartet, Coffee Concert, Old Market, Hove, 11.1.2009 (RA)

Haydn: Quartet in Eb, op.9/2

Holloway: Quartet No 2 (2004)

Beethoven: Quartet in C sharp minor, op.131


The flourishing body of Old Market Coffee Concert supporters have their own version of a traditional saying. It goes something like: “You know you’re getting older when you realise the string quartets these days all look younger than you.”

But novel now for many of those supporters is that the string quartets these days are looking younger than their own children. The flow of quality ensembles making their way and reputation after forming in the music colleges of Britain and Europe is apparently unceasing.  There are lots of competition and broadcasting opportunities now – the Sacconi has already won plenty of awards – and the time may even come when the football World Cup, to the TV-watching globe, blows open the delight of chamber music by using some as its signature theme.

During coverage, I can hear the rasping opening of Beethoven’s F minor quartet accompanying some flaring player confrontation with a referee. And an incisive and scintillating attacking move the length of the entire pitch being replayed over and over again to the fire of Mendelssohn’s Octet opening allegro – a work the Sacconi treasure having performed with the veteran Chilingirian Quartet at the old Market some years ago.

Relating this anecdote to the audience was the Sacconi’s first violinist, Ben Hancox, whose wife attended Sussex University. Looking at Hancox, his boyish looks and mop haircut making him pass for the member of a 1960s Merseyside pop group, it was hard to imagine how much younger he could have seemed during that Octet performance.

The world goes on changing. After listening to Haydn Robin Holloway and late Beethoven played by two lads in black shirts and trousers, and two blonde lasses in red satin skirts and black tops - three of them Men or Maids of Kent - the audience stepped outside and walked straight into a protest march for the Palestinians in Gaza that was heading for Brighton city centre.  An extremely rude awakening after the sublimity of Beethoven’s C sharp minor quartet, which closed the morning, following the complimentary sherry or fruit juice and yet more different types of tempting interval cake. But of course, Beethoven would have been marching with them.

As readers of my other reviews of the popular Coffee Concerts would know to expect by now, I usually say little about performances of most late Beethoven. To understand these unfathomably wonderful quartets, which inhabit a world of originality beyond the prosaic one of the nine symphonies, but bridged between by the Missa Solemnis, is a lifetime’s journey of sobering pleasure and stimulation. And I haven’t been far enough along it. Have you? Besides, surely  only a fellow string quartet player is in a truly qualified position to write a criticism – and very  few of them would even dare.

Talking afterwards with Hancox, he put me straight on something. The average age of himself, second violinist Hannah Dawson, violist Robin Ashwell and cellist Cara Berridge, was getting near to 30. And so, one imagines it might. Not only does a life in music, cleanly pursued, keep you looking young. But it must take a number of years before a youthful string quartet feel capable of looking Beethoven’s late quartets honestly in the eye and daring to lay them onto their music stands.

The C sharp minor, in its seven awe-inspiring, daisy-chain-linked movements, followed the second Robin Holloway Quartet, of 2004, which has five. The Sacconi have been playing the Holloway around Europe since they premiered it last year, and Hancox introduced it as Holloway’s “enigma variations” of some of his American friends. In this concert, its wide scale bridged the Beethoven with the opening piece - the elegantly succinct, four-movement early Haydn Quartet in Eb, opus 9 no 2, which emanates from the crucible of the string quartet as a serious medium, initiated by the hand of Haydn himself.

For the audience, the essentially elegiac Holloway Quartet presented an English challenge, instead of their more usual one from a European pen. The Sacconi got their teeth into the varying moods and the often pleasing, unusual textures and the passing adventurous and entertaining rhythms. The finale, from 1994, is Holloway’s tribute to David Huntley - like Elgar’s Nimrod (AE Jaeger), a friend working for a publisher, in this case Boosey and Hawkes in New York. Here, serious anger is soothed into a fond farewell by an audible coming to terms through tunnels of confusion and enforced reflection.

The Sacconis showed they are in the business of responsible and substantial music making that is not just a re-creation of Viennese or Victorian drawing-room delectation.

Further Coffee Concerts are on February 8 – The Wihan Quartet - February 22 – The Gould Piano Trio and March 8 – The Eroica Quartet. Admission prices are £10-£20. Box office: 01273 736222.

Richard Amey

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