Brodsky Quartet

2nd February 2024 at 7.30pm

‘ ….and the players gave unstintingly of their passion and energies, playing with a spirit so transformational you felt they were actually improving the world’

The Strad

Concert Review

by Brian Newbould

This was no ordinary concert.  Visually, there was the unique appeal of the staging, with cellist Jacqueline Thomas enthroned on her queenly dais while the other players were on their feet, enabled to bring to bear their whole physique to give extra thrust to the music.  Indeed those feet would occasionally leave the ground, adding a touch of the Terpsichorean to the agreeably Thespian scene.  Then there was the music, including the most extended quartet of the Classical period – the Schubert G major – as well as the substantial Debussy quartet, and some Bach besides.

To take the Bach first, as the Brodsky did, what he heard was billed as an arrangement of that composer’s first Sonata for unaccompanied violin by the Brodsky’s violist Paul Cassidy.  An arrangement?  This was, rather, a re-composition.  Bach himself was an inveterate arranger of his own works for other media or ensembles; but this was not an exercise of that order.  It was a filling-out of Bach’s solo melodic line for four players, and it went beyond simply seeking out the harmonic implications of that solo line.  This involved creating a ‘texture’ – a multi-voiced texture suited to a medium (the string quartet) unknown to its composer.  The result hovered somewhat uneasily between Baroque, Galant and Classical style – perhaps inevitably given that a bridge between Leipzig Cantor Bach’s day and the radically different (‘Viennese’) age of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert had to be built.  And running at twenty minutes or more, it was rather more than an ‘overture’ to an already substantial programme.  Did I hear a voice asking “wouldn’t one of those breezy little Haydn quartets have been a more fitting opener?”

There followed one of the finest possible demonstrations of quartet playing in Debussy’s sole Quartet in G minor, a masterpiece written just seven years before the turn of the 20^th century, so not reflecting that pioneering originality to be found in his works of the first two decades of the new century.  Yet the music goes beyond the Central European status quo, with its tingling sonorities, quizzical harmonies, and – well, Gallic colouring.  And the Brodsky performance was outstanding, displaying their instrumental skills at every turn.  Here were four players in impressive command of their instruments, and nowhere more so than in that sustained, high, soft chord which ends the slow movement, a sure test of its players’ bow control.  The faster movements had all the vitality needed, as well as finely calibrated textures.

Then there was the Schubert, in an altogether fine performance, indeed exceptionally fine. The trio section of the scherzo might be singled out for its particularly sweet and expressive treatment, and there was no lack of energy in the unforgiving finale, whose parade of themes and episodes can astonish the first-time listener and exhaust even the most tried and tested of ensembles.  A remarkable end to a giant but memorable concert.  (Thinks: Encores?  You must be joking!)