Friday 12 April

The second day of the festival opened with a masterclass from the Caroducci Quartet and a lunchtime concert from the Benyounes Quartet.  Later that afternoon the Trinity Laban String Ensemble was joined by the Benyounes Quartet in the Old Royal Naval College Chapel. Due to train delays I unfortunately missed the opening Schnittke but was comfortably seated in time for a ravishing performance of Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro for Strings. The fact that the higher strings were all standing seemed to give a greater impact to the ensemble with a richness and warmth often missing in larger concert halls. A live performance also highlights the quartet’s relationship to the main ensemble and the sensitivity of Elgar’s scoring for them. There was an eagerness and bite to the playing which impressed as well as a readiness to accept the sentimental edge of the more reflective passages.

Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony in C minor – an arrangement by Rudolf Barshai of the Eighth String Quartet – could hardly have been more different and highlighted the versatility of the ensemble. The opening may be bleak but it was the intensity of the Allegro Molto which galvanised the listener. The Allegretto dances its way forward – with hints of the Dance of Death rather than a folk festival and the brooding Largos drew the work to its uncompromising close. The anger in these final pages would seem to deny any suicidal tendencies, but this is a powerfully disturbing work, and played with relish. Ani Karapetyan was an impressive soloist in this arrangement, and the ensemble was sensitively conducted by Nic Pendlebury.

In the evening we were back in the chapel for the Quatuor Mosaiques, who play period instruments with gut strings. After many hours of modern instruments it took a little time to adjust to the softer, less focussed tones of the quartet. They opened with three fugues by Gregor Werner for which Haydn had provided slow introductions. Only the third – an Adagiose – proved of any real interest, and the fugues by Werner were pleasant but uninvolving.

Haydn’s own F minor quartet, Op20 No5, followed and proved more satisfactory. The opening Moderato demonstrated how forward looking his composition was even at this early stage and the hesitant Menuet fascinates in its seeming inability to decide where it is going. The Adagio brings a necessary respite before the solid ground of the fugal Finale.

As part of the late Beethoven cycle, the quartet ended their concert with Op130 and the Grosse Fugue. There was a slight mismatch between the printed programme and their performance. We had read that the quartet would be performed in Beethoven’s revised version with the new shorter final movement, followed by a separate performance of the Grosse Fugue. In the event we were given the original version, with the Grosse Fugue as the final movement. No problem, but a jolt to the system when they launched unexpectedly into the Grosse Fugue. The performance was well shaped, though the use of gut strings in this acoustic tends to soften the details to the point where, in the Presto, they became fudged. The Andante was more expressive and the Alla danza maintained a seductive rhythm. The Cavatina again lost some detail in the inner voices, but clarity returned for the final movement, with impressive authority and sense of structure.

The final day brings more workshops and the site specific world premiere of Deirdre Gribbin’s Hearing Your Genes Evolve on the Cutty Sark. BH

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