Tag Archives: Castalian Quartet

East Neuk at 20

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At the Opening Concert of this year’s East Neuk Festival, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s Principal Guest conductor paused between the first and second movements of Lars-Erik Larsson’s Pastoral Suite to allow a raucous posse of motorcyclists to pass the Bowhouse before the music continued, but Andrew Manze could do nothing to mitigate the noise of a helicopter overhead during the Andante of Schubert’s Symphony No. 6.

Perhaps the pilot was a Stockhausen fan at the wrong gig, because at the closing concert in the same venue, composer Sally Beamish contrived an event as fascinating as the German’s late 20th century experiment with the Arditti Quartet playing in separate aircraft.

Her piece, Field of Stars, had inspiration every bit as complex, and the demanding task of employing four faithful visiting ensembles in a single work. The Belcea, Castalian, Elias and Pavel Haas Quartets were behind the audience as well as onstage, and each cellist was furnished with a tuned bell-cymbal as a call sign for the group’s location.

Just as the farm building was impressively effective for the SCO’s opener – the programme completed by Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez with the soloist another faithful friend of ENF, Sean Shibe – Beamish made her commission a site-specific triumph to end the 20th edition of the festival.

Weaving a tapestry of international melodies into her compact creation, and exploiting many of the techniques of which the string players are capable along the way, it ended with a medieval hymn-tune that vaguely recalled La Vie En Rose. The composition may have been tailor-made for the space, but thoughtful music producers should surely be able to adapt it to other contexts.

The programmatic setting for its premiere could scarcely have been richer. All 16 players made a luxury string orchestra for the Andante Festivo by Sibelius at the start, with the Castalian’s Finnish first violin Sini Simonen appropriately in the position of concert-master.

Her quartet combined with the Belcea for the performance of Mendelssohn’s youthful Octet that closed the concert, with Corinne Belcea in imperious command and the Belcea’s cellist Antoine Lederlin bossing the start of the Presto finale.

The first half had seen the completion of the festival’s cycle of the Late Quartets of Beethoven, the Pavel Haas showing that the complexity of the second and fourth movements of Opus 135 in F defy its “contract-filler” reputation. The emotive slow movement was admittedly waiting in the composer’s bottom-drawer, but we already knew that from the Belcea’s equally heart-breaking rendition of it as an encore to the huge Opus 131 (for which it had failed to make the cut) in Crail Church two days earlier.

The Beethoven journey had begun in Kilrenny Kirk on Thursday with the Elias playing Opus 127 in E-flat, its big opening chords a bit of a red-herring given the intimacy of the long central Adagio and the inventive playfulness of the music in the later movements. Like the Belcea in Crail, the Elias prefaced the Beethoven with Mozart, but the Castalian opened their concert, of Opus 139 with the Grosse Fuge, with Thomas Ades’s seven-movement Arcadiana, Natalie Loughran’s viola leading the way in water-themed music which takes a beguiling turn into the world of tango half way through.

The quartets were far from the only excursion of the festival programme, the most literal being Saturday’s “Shibe Trail” to three places in Anstruther and through music from the early 1600s to the year before last, played on lute, classical guitar and electric guitar and electronics. Each recital was relatively brief but the range of composition, and multi-disciplined virtuosity Sean Shibe demonstrated was fantastic. From John Dowland to Meredith Monk might not actually seem so far in vocal music terms, but to be taken from one to the other instrumentally was a different journey altogether.

The brief life of Franz Schubert was another thread of the 20th East Neuk, including performances of the song cycles by baritone James Newby and tenor Mark Padmore with pianist Joseph Middleton. Newby’s performance of Die Schone Mullerin was too dramatic for some, but his animated storytelling surely cast fresh light on the familiar sequence.

Employing an impressive range of tone and timbre, Newby’s theatrical reading was clearly addressed to listeners and objects alive in his imagination and it was all too easy to see the babbling brook at his feet in Crail Church. The portrait he drew of the protagonist in these poems was often a disturbing one, the fickle girlfriend ultimately incidental to his existential crisis and bitter and disturbed character.

He and Middleton had clearly worked precisely on the pacing and pauses of the recital, and the pianist’s picture-painting was as essential in what was an unforgettable performance.

So too was the Pavel Haas Quartet’s of Schubert’s Quintet from the last year of his life, cellist Ivan Vokac joining the great collaborators. His line was often at the bottom of the instrument’s range and a little like that of a rhythm section string bass, and the whole work was revealed to be as muscular as this group can be relied upon to find in any music. If that was especially true of Janacek’s String Quartet No 1, which opened the quartet’s Crail recital – and of which they are surely the finest exponents – it was revealing how much the Schubert benefitted from the same approach.

Earlier on the Festival’s last day, a gathering of yet more familiar festival faces celebrated the event’s genesis, inspired by the success of a one-off chamber concert at St Ayle in Cellardyke, featuring Beethoven’s Septet of 1800. A supergroup of chamber musicians gathered in the same place to play the same work, the occasion also remembering cellist and teacher David Watkin, and only slightly diminished by some technical difficulties with the instrument of violinist Alexander Janiczek, which discombobulated even this most experienced of players.

(Pictures: Neil Hanna)

Keith Bruce

EIF: Castalian Quartet

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Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

It’s just over a month since the excellent Castalian String Quartet struck a particularly refreshing note at Fife’s East Neuk Festival. On that occasion, the repertoire was mainstream Mozart and Dvorak, the music stirringly revitalised by astute characterisation and an entertaining spirit of playfulness. At the heart of Friday’s Edinburgh International Festival appearance, the key challenge was to introduce an entirely new piece, the world premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Awake.

As it happened, the stakes were raised twofold. With regular second violinist Daniel Roberts ruled out through illness, his place was taken last-minute by the young London-based Japanese violinist Yume Fijise. To fill Roberts’ boots in such a rushed way, and on such a prominent platform, would have been no easy ask, yet Fujise responded not only with laudable efficiency, but a sense of musical compatibility that grew more easeful and confident as the programme progressed. She’s no stranger to quartet playing, being leader of the award-winning Kleio Quartet.

Turnage’s new string quartet – an uncharacteristically understated creation by a 63-year-old composer more associated in his younger days with musical hooliganism – was in safe hands. Inspired by the black Polish-African violinist, George Bridgetower, who famously impressed Beethoven, and to whom the latter’s Kreuzer Sonata was originally dedicated, a solo violin has first say, establishing an air of elegance and calm that is seldom seriously challenged throughout the two movements, their soft political message implicit in the titles, Bridgetower 23 and Shut Out.

This performance emphasised the reflectiveness and genuine attractiveness of the music, even where a hint of a rock ostinato emerged in the cello, abating rather than dominating as the opening movement subsided to near nothing. That plaintiveness persisted in the second movement, this time a jabbing repeated motif offering the only real threat to its languid countenance. What was so surprising about this piece was also a mark of its incredibly beauty.

The Beethoven connection prevailed either side of the Turnage, if effectively one step removed in Janacek’s String Quartet No 1 – subtitled the “Kreuzer Sonata”, though directly in reference to Tolstoy’s novel – which opened the recital. It’s a nervous piece at the best of times, frenetically buzzing ponticelli like some restless obsession, the focus of which took time to settle here, but when it did, embraced its excitable allure.

To end with Beethoven’s String Quartet in B flat, Op 130, and its original Grosse Fuge finale (later numbered separately as Op 133), was to send us away mentally exhausted. The opening five movements provided neat and precise stimulation, from the gentle whimsy of the scherzo and lapping waves of the Alla danza tedesca, to the lyrical sweetness of the Cavatina. Then the full force of the Grosse Fuge, like a wild uncontrollable force of nature, courting danger at times, venturing close to collision, but ultimately providing the explosive catharsis Beethoven unequivocally intended.

Ken Walton

East Neuk Festival 1

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Kilkenny Church / Crail Church

Maybe it was too much to ask of the Scottish weather that the scorcher we’d enjoyed throughout June remain firmly  in place for the 2023 East Neuk Festival. In the event, the close of the month, coinciding with the first two days of the Festival, offered more typical climatic variables – a sizzling Thursday followed by a cool, showery Friday – and so did the music.

Thursday’s performances felt like a congenial warm-up: two really interesting programmes delivered with just a suspicion of settling in – not exactly unexpected after the impact and hangover of Covid. 

First up was a return ENF visit by French-Canadian cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras, a solo recital in the amiable ambience of Kilrenny Church that began in the 20th century – a selection of Geörgy Kurtág’s étude-like aphorisms – and ended with the sanguine Bach Cello Suite in C minor. It was in the former – incendiary miniatures scattered among the progressive Hungarian composer’s output like personal journal entries – that Queyras realised the most positive impact, incisive and colourful interpretations that nailed the ballistic concentration of the music.

Beyond that, Queyras’ playing was probing and eloquent, emotive in its realisation of the inner musings expressed by Turkish composer Ahmet Annan Saygun in his Bach-like Partita for Cello, yet as a consequence, too free in its rhythmic definition, which tended to rob the ensuing Bach Suite, and two other short Baroque pieces, of their natural energy.

There was no lack of oomph in that evening’s Crail Church programme by the Belcea Quartet and Friends, which saw the familiar core ensemble augmented with Queyras and feisty Berlin Philharmonic violist Diyang Mei for a gritty performance of Brahms’ String Sextet No 1 in B flat, prefaced by a bombastic solo performance of movements from Liszt’s Les Années de Pèlerinage Book II by pianist Bertrand Chamanyou.

Chamanyou’s Liszt was epic, power-driven at times to the point of near-destruction, yet shot through with plentiful moments of deep sensitivity and flowing virtuosity to counter its viciousness. The closing Dante-inspired work was a case in point, thrillingly apocalyptic, but edging towards tonal distortion. If the Brahms adopted something of that bravado mentality, it was to mostly positive ends and a performance attuned fittingly to both the music’s homogenous richness and internal strife.

Friday held its own fascination, a thrilling late morning Kilrenny programme by the Castalian Quartet, followed late afternoon by an individualistic solo recital from South Korean pianist Yeol Eum Son. 

Previous visits by the Castalian Quartet have been notable for the naturalness with which they strike a classy balance between the individual and the body corporate. Such was the magical essence of a Mozart Quartet in D minor that divulged, through a combination of smiling interaction and devious self opinion, its awakening drama and characterful grace. Fuller passions emerged in the Dvorak, yet enlivened by that same flexible discipline and measured effusion.

Like the Castalians, Yeol Eum Son will be back in Scotland later this summer for the Edinburgh International Festival, which on this evidence will be a starry twin attraction. Son, whose recent recordings of the complete Mozart piano sonatas were singularly impressive, played two of these works in her Crail programme. In the C Minor Fantasy her total immersion in the music was fascinating, at the same time unnerving. She seemed to agonise over the opining of the Fantasy, as if deliberately deconstructing its flow. One the other hand, the C minor Sonata took its natural course, a little short on lyrical inevitability perhaps, but genuinely spirited.

Impetuousness had its place in Janacek’s Sonata No 1 (From the Street), with its disturbing transformations – quite Jekyll and Hyde in character and style – and wild excursions between achingly suspended time and crashing climaxes. Son signed off with exuberant flair in the Sonata No 2 by Ukrainian composer Nikolay Kapustin. It is unadulterated jazz, frenzied improvisation writ large, played here with breathtaking virtuosity and physical abandon. It had its tender moments – a bluesy Largo with super-heated harmonies – but the emphasis was on showmanship, which Son applied full on. She leapt from her stool in the final flurry of madcap glissandi; we all but jumped from our own seats in instant response.

Ken Walton 

EAST NEUK: Castalian / Tsoy

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Bowhouse, St Monans, Fife

The East Neuk Festival has a long and successful record in platforming the best young string quartets. A central presence in this year’s downscaled live Festival activity – a much-welcomed three-day concentration of socially-distances concerts in the spacious Bowhouse venue near St Monans – was the Castalian Quartet, ten years old this year, but still very much part of the younger generation UK ensembles scene with a 2019 Royal Philharmonic Society Young Artist of the Year award to prove it.

They gave two concerts in Fife last weekend: one on Saturday that tested their mettle (and Beethoven’s) against the torrents of rain crashing down on the Bowhouse roof; the other with a double dose of sunny Mendelssohn that wasn’t all it seemed, but which played out under more clement East Neuk skies.

In either case, the punchy individuality of this ensemble was a steady theme. It was Beethoven’s first composed quartet, Op18 No3, that came with foul-weather accompaniment, despite which the Castalians, with smiling acceptance, breathed continuous fresh thoughts into the music. Their teamwork was intuitive, the phrases rising and ebbing in natural, unanimous undulations. This opening performance took a moment to settle, but when it did their completeness fed the music with mirth, muscle and, when called for, a profound reflectiveness. 

It was paired with Dvorak’s last completed quartet, Op105, a work of intense emotional ambivalence that plays out like a tussle between the heart and the head. The players embraced that challenge, chasing the debate through the stormy passions of the opening two movements, the darker moods of the Lento, and the whirlwind finale, where doubts are finally dispelled.

Sunday’s second concert played games with the name Mendelssohn. For these were two quartets by different siblings – the famous Felix and his almost-as-famous sister Fanny – and second violinist Daniel Roberts made the most of a superbly concocted introduction that avoided telling us which was which. That, he said, would be put to a show of hands at the end. The majority got it right.

The superior consistency and seamless craftsmanship of Felix’s Quartet in F minor Op80 was evident from the the start, and a seething, virtuoso performance by the Castilians nailed it completely. The whole performance was lifted by crafty subtleties of interplay, expressive precision and, in the finale, fearless bravado. In Fanny’s E Flat Quartet – dedicated to the memory of her predeceased brother – they homed in on the gentler lyrical DNA, but equally revelled in another wild and dangerous finale.

This East Neuk series began on Friday with a solo recital by the young Russian pianist Samson Tsoy. His pairing of pieces was one of extremes. He opened with a selection of Geörgy Kurtág’s short and irreverent Játékok pieces, effectively games for the piano in which the composer indulges mean and mischievous humour. Guaranteed to jolt an audience into life is Hommage a Csajkovszkij, a grotesque play on the opening piano chords of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, which are converted into an eruption of emphatic forearm clusters.

Tsoy, clearly at home in this ironic style, chose six of the pieces, including the more delicate Hommage a Schubert, which seemed a perfect teaser for the Schubert B flat Sonata that was to follow.

It was in that late Schubert sonata that Tsoy’s focus seemed to weaken. His articulation of the lyrical line was judiciously firm, and there was serious thought put into the character and shape of individual paragraphs. But as a whole, this performance was over-thought, in some cases over-wrought. Schubert doesn’t simply play itself, but there are natural dimensions within which his music is best kept. Tsoy took us into a more indulgent place.
Ken Walton 

Additional online activity from ENF is available to view till 1 Augustat  https://eastneukfestival.com/events/online/