United Kingdom Mozart, Beamish: Elias String Quartet (Sara Bitlloch and Donald Grant [violin], Simone van der Giessen [viola], Marie Bitlloch [cello]), Robin Eire (viola). Turner Sims, Southampton, 5.12.2024. (CK)
Mozart – String Quintet in D, K593; String Quintet in G minor, K516
Beamish – Epilogue
A temper of autumnal wistfulness hung over a well-filled Turner Sims in these beautiful performances by the augmented Elias String Quartet: a temper that Mozart’s moments of lightness and power couldn’t totally dispel. Every of those late String Quintets is a part of a pair (K593/K614; K515/K516): and I believe it’s honest to say that the Eliases selected to play the extra troubled, extra inward of every pair.
K593 begins engagingly, the cello politely opening the door for us right into a gracious corridor, well-lit and spacious, although there are darker components. The considerate Adagio appeared to me to hold hearth; although this can be a property of the music somewhat than the way in which it was carried out. In distinction, the Minuet has a Haydnesque robustness (digression: somebody as soon as helpfully noticed that for those who can sing a Minuet to the phrases ‘Are you the O’Reilly who owns this lodge?’ it’s by Haydn). The sunshine contact of the Eliases within the Trio steered bugs working up a wall (within the finale a few of them run down once more, some scurry off in all instructions). The quintet was finely performed, with nothing overdone, the whole lot in proportion: enjoying of temperament and joie de vivre the place acceptable inside an total sense of wistfulness – no different phrase will do – calmly however tellingly evoked.
Sally Beamish is a composer whose music could catch you unawares. It’s sturdy on environment, leaning to Northern spareness and readability somewhat than Mediterranean heat. She is herself knowledgeable viola participant: she might be heard as a member of the Raphael Ensemble of their traditional Hyperion discs of sextets by Brahms, Dvořák and others. I keep in mind listening to her enjoying her personal tribute to Peter Maxwell Davies, Glanz for solo viola, in a hushed St Magnus Cathedral in Orkney, in the midst of a Memorial live performance following Max’s loss of life. Final 12 months, right here within the Turner Sims, the Fidelio Trio performed her distillation of Debussy’s La mer for piano trio. In each these items Beamish references different music to accentuate her personal creativity (Glanz derives from Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht): and he or she does so in Epilogue, the eight-minute piece for string quintet carried out right here. By some alchemy of her personal the ‘borrowed’ music by no means sounds by-product; all the time pristine.
Earlier than they performed Epilogue Donald Grant (second violin) spoke warmly of their long-standing relationship with the composer: 12 years in the past she wrote a quartet for them, and so they have commissioned one other. He additionally paid tribute to their good friend Robin Eire, viola participant with The Lindsays for 20 years, onstage with them as second viola in these unusually constituted Mozart string quintets.
Beamish is a Quaker, and the impulse behind Epilogue is the calming of the thoughts within the silence on the finish of a Quaker exercise. The title implies a concord with the sensation in Mozart’s late quintets: the image that got here to my thoughts was of gulls in opposition to a sundown sky. The music resolves right into a rapt and nearly disembodied apparition of Tallis’ Canon: spellbinding.
And so to Mozart’s G minor Quintet, K516, darker brother of the buoyant C main Quintet, K515. One doesn’t must pay attention for lengthy to grasp that those that examine it to the G minor Symphony K550 usually are not imagining issues. The music sings, however sadly: there may be an insistent four-note rising and falling determine like a sob. Once more, the 5 gamers introduced out the ‘weeping’ character of the music with out overdoing it. The Minuet was performed with sturdy accents and dramatic contrasts; the major-key Trio, sweetly performed, was immensely touching in its juxtaposition to the strict minor-key materials of the encircling Minuet. After which the Adagio: its fragile, hymn-like opening shortly falling aside into damaged phrases, looking for their method in the dead of night. The music generated nice pressure; its highly-charged pauses had been like openings onto silence – maybe, even, the silence of loss of life. Short-term aid got here with the light major-key cascades of the primary violin over a rocking cello; however the music sank to nothing, like time itself winding all the way down to its finish.
The sombre opening of the finale failed to interrupt the temper, the primary violin keening over the G minor murmuring of the opposite devices. When Mozart lastly opens the shutters and lets within the G main solar, the 5 gamers caught the music’s lightness marvellously – I considered Oberon’s ‘Sing and dance it trippingly’ – the primary violin specifically giving a spectacular show. However the aid is tempered – haunted, even – by echoes: that sobbing motif from the primary motion seems in mutant type. Because the programme’s glorious (and nameless) annotator put it, ‘The music remembers all too effectively the place it has been.’
Over an hour of prime Mozart, superbly performed; eight minutes of Sally Beamish. But it was her piece that was in my thoughts and reminiscence as we left the Turner Sims, and her music that I resolved to discover additional. By no means thoughts that: what is going to linger longest, I believe, is the standard and sensitivity of the enjoying of the Elias String Quartet and violist Robin Eire, and the way in which they held us in an unbroken spell of quietness by the entire night.
Chris Kettle
