Tag Archives: Maxwell Quartet

Maxwell Quartet, Cohen & Rabinovich

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Lammermuir Festival, Dunbar Parish Church

Few of us are likely to have heard Ernest Chausson’s Concert for Violin, Piano and String Quartet, a hybrid tour de force that may ostensibly look like a work for piano sextet, but manifests itself more dramatically as a kind of concerto grosso in which the solo violin and hard-working pianist function as the prime protagonists against the supportive function of the quartet.

Dunbar Parish Church was the perfect sounding board for this rare Lammermuir Festival performance, its resplendent acoustics remarkable in allowing a voluminous amplification of the string sound, yet still facilitating intricate and exuberant clarity. This was the first of two programmes by the Maxwell Quartet, joined for this particular work by Canadian violinist Diana Cohen and Israeli pianist Roman Rabinovich.

Prior to the Chausson, the first half had revealed the Maxwells in tip-top form and in two areas of performance they have made their own: Haydn quartets, and their own uniquely inspired arrangements of traditional Scots melodies. 

They opened with Haydn’s Quartet in F minor, Op20 No5, its crafted subtleties never too shadowy, never too brazen, furnished with enough endearing ambivalence to capture the moodiness lurking beneath the quiet optimism. Beyond a crisp but questioning opening movement and more relaxed Menuetto, the Siciliano-like lilt of the Adagio offered some nostalgic respite before the fugal directness and contained ebullience of the finale. 

Where the Haydn brought finesse, excitement, stylistic integrity and fortifying virtuosity from an ensemble currently at the height of its game, the Scots arrangements – ranging from a quirkily-scored bagpipe tune to neatly-elaborated fiddle tunes by Neil Gow and Nathaniel Gow – were as welcome for the tastefulness of their conception as the bewitching perfection of their delivery.

Then the Chausson, a lengthy but wholly satisfying glimpse into a work that surely deserves greater exposure than it has to date, and certainly throws up a realisation that this short-lived French composer had more to offer than the lazy tendency to pass him off as another French sub-Romantic touched by the influences of Massenet, Wagner and Franck. 

Yes, there are hallmarks of Franck in a dramatic opening motif that dominates the soul of the massive opening movement, which these players expressed in the most thrilling fashion. But is there not also a sense, in the evocative whole tone references and gestures of expressionist excess, that Chausson, in this 1890s work, was edging into the searching sound worlds of Debussy, perhaps even early Schoenberg? Such adventurousness was certainly captured in Thursday’s performance.

It was there again in the dreaminess of the short Sicilienne, followed by a slow movement soaked in melancholy, its descending chromatic lines gnawingly tragic. The mood lifted for a whirlwind finale, the eccentric rhythms and ferocious energy carrying a full-blooded performance to its gripping end. The prominent sweetness of Cohen’s violin playing and exhaustive virtuosity of Rabinovich’s pianism integrated seamlessly with the ever-reliable joie-de-vivre of the Maxwells. 

Ken Walton

Dunedin Consort / Maxwell Quartet

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Crichton Collegiate Church, by Pathhead/Dirleton Kirk

The multifaceted 2023 edition of the Lammermuir Festival – very possibly the most artistically successful in its history, making Creative Scotland’s absence as a supporter all the more absurd – revealed yet another face on its final Sunday. In two of its most architecturally beautiful and acoustically admired venues we heard very different sung music, composed centuries apart, that fitted their original purpose as places of worship.

Roddy Willliams closed his short but highly effective recital at Dirleton Kirk in the afternoon with the Five Mystical Songs of Ralph Vaughan Williams, setting lyrics by metaphysical poet George Herbert, in the composer’s own arrangement for piano (Christopher Glynn) and single strings (the Maxwell Quartet).

Herbert’s guidance to living the Christian life is still part of the liturgy of the church, and the unmistakable voice of the popular baritone sounded wonderful in the closing Antiphon: Let all the world in every corner sing, My God and King!

Less familiar were the settings of English Folk Songs by Vaughan Williams in the singer’s own arrangements for string quartet, which were as crisp as his own immaculate diction. Originally a lockdown project with soprano Mary Bevan and tenor Nicky Spence, Williams took on all the characters in these tales himself with changes of tone and timbre. In a varied selection from the composer’s vast archaeological project, Captain Grant was a geographically appropriate tale of an Edinburgh jail-break, while others dealt with lovers bereft, spurned and slightly soiled.

Preceding the songs and hymns, in the first half the Maxwells and Glynn combined forces for Elgar’s Piano Quintet, perhaps not obvious territory for this quartet but to which they brought their own folk-tinged style, to the music’s great profit. The work is full of changes of mood and tone, the haunted opening giving way to a dance tune that sounds almost Mediterranean, and a spooky carnival ride alternating with a stride across the South Downs in the finale. With a blended sound in the strings that only long acquaintance can bring, and assertive contributions from the pianist, this performance told its tale in what seemed a very swift 40 minutes.

Earlier in the day, at the well-off-the-beaten-track Crichton Collegiate Church (actually in Midlothian), the sequence of secular and sacred was reversed in soprano Nardus Williams’s recital with a Dunedin Consort quintet, led by John Butt from chamber organ and harpsichord.

Following on neatly from the Dunedin’s Out of Her Mouth production in June, featuring three of French composer Elizabeth Jacquet de la Guerre’s Biblical cantatas, this programme included her instrumental music alongside songs and solo cantatas by her female contemporaries and predecessors in Italy.

The convent composers featured in the first half may have had the Saviour and religious life as their subject, but they were clearly not cloistered from worldly desires and Williams brought real passion to her delivery, whether seated or standing. Singing from memory, she brought an expressiveness to these appeals for the bliss of Heaven or an encounter with the Christ-child that contrasted with the wry, more cynical tone of Barbara Strozzi in La vendetta, the song that gave the recital its title.

The lesson-telling of that and Costuma de grandi, the brilliant word-setting of Havete torto and the 12 minute mono-drama Hor che Apollo made the sequence after the interval a superb introduction to Strozzi, but the genius of the programme was the way it presented her work in context, with the Dunedin instrumentalists on top form.

The soprano – now happily a Dunedin stalwart – was the star however, in what was a beautifully nuanced, delightfully ornamented and utterly compelling performance.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Nardus Williams by Bertie Watson

Music at Paxton

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Paxton House, by Berwick

Glasgow’s Royal Conservatoire of Scotland alumnus Ryan Corbett recently became the first player of the accordion to join the BBC’s career-making New Generation Artists scheme, and it is also true that “box” players are a rare sight in the Picture Gallery of Paxton House, the splendid principal venue for the returned Music at Paxton Summer Festival of Chamber Music in the Borders.

The very handsome Italian instrument played by the young man from Milngavie made an impressive noise under the glass cupola of the portrait-and-landscape-lined room, as he spanned centuries of music composed for much larger keyboards as well as his own.

The Bach Prelude & Fugue and Scarlatti Sonata with which he began displayed that range, as well his own remarkable virtuosity. I am not clear how it is possible to achieve the variation in voice, as well as tone and dynamics, we heard in his approach to music written for organ and piano, but it was certainly audible. And the visual advantage of the front-facing accordion is that his remarkably dextrous technique could not have been easier to admire.

His arrangements of Tchaikovsky’s Romance in F Minor and Mendelssohn’s Rondo Capriccioso also made familiar music very fresh, the latter sounding as if it were written for the instrument, and the former acquiring a flavour of the Left Bank in Paris.

French composer Franck Angelis also featured in the recital, his Etude adapting a theme of Astor Piazzolla. The Argentinian master’s influence could be heard in the third movement of the Sonata No 1 for accordion by Alexander Nagaev, although the first shared rhythms with Meade Lux Lewis’s Honky Tonk Train Blues and the second the dramatic atmosphere of Phantom of the Opera.

Corbett’s encore of Semionov’s Don Rhapsody also came from the school of contemporary Russian composition for the instrument, but the most fascinating recent work in the programme was Czech Jindrich Feld’s Konzertstuck, from 1974 and an exploration of the technical limits of the accordion with contrasting spare moments.

Corbett was back on stage at the end of Sunday afternoon, as a guest of the Maxwell Quartet, joining in arrangements of traditional music from Lewis and Shetland that concluded the versatile group’s three year tenure as Music at Paxton’s resident group.

Festival Director Angus Smith was quite clear that he intends to invite them back, but the programme they performed was the perfect conclusion to that relationship. Haydn’s Opus 77 No 2 Quartet in F is the sort of repertoire at which the Maxwell excels, ensemble balance perfect from the start, rhythmic phrases passed round with glee in the second movement, as was the Andante melody, which is Haydn at his loveliest.

It is a surprisingly rare phenomenon – print production schedules being a factor – but the Paxton programme note perfectly matched the group’s performance of Brahms’ 1876 String Quartet No 3, and had the quotes from the composer to match their approach.

As with the Haydn, the slow movement is the most Brahmsian of Brahms, but throughout the piece the players found a lightness of touch that distinguished the performance, especially in the musical playfulness of the third movement and the finale. Not even a short hiatus to rectify a tuning problem with George Smith’s violin disturbed their flow.

The party-piece of this fond “adieu” was a selection from Roxanna Panufnik’s collaboration with poet Wendy Cope, “The Audience”. In singer and broadcaster Jamie MacDougall the quartet had the perfect collaborator for this comic dissection of the theatre of chamber music performance. MacDougall wisely did not labour the rhymes in the text with a characterful delivery of Cope’s storyline, introducing us to the musicians, the critic, the couple on a first date and the interval drinker. Panufnik’s music is as witty in its own style, and as – I think – the only working scribe in this audience, I’ll take her sonic depiction of the anguished crafting of these words over Cope’s cynicism any day!

Keith Bruce

Maxwell Quartet

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Perth Concert Hall

How very well chosen were this pair of crucial works of the string quartet repertoire, complementary in their forging ahead with the form, well short of two decades apart in their composition, and each utterly emblematic of the voice of the composer.

Just as significantly, Haydn’s “Rider” Quartet, Opus 74 No 3, and Beethoven’s “Harp”, his 10th String Quartet and also, curiously, Opus 74, are works for an experienced group to explore fully. Just as they are mature works by their respective composers, they are pieces for a well-established quartet. The Maxwells are that group, no longer youths who met at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and won their first international recognition at the Trondheim competition. Even the flowing lockdown locks and bushy beards cannot disguise that.

The crisp and vibrant opening Allegro of the Haydn made that intent immediately obvious, but it was the rich, blended sound in the Largo that follows that confirmed it, with first violin Colin Scobie on special form on top. The short Menuetto began and ended with as much flourish before the Finale that gives the work its nickname through its galloping rhythms. This is Haydn at his most playful and smile-provoking, and there were smiles all round to confirm that.

If it is possible that Haydn indeed had horse-riding in his mind, it is less likely that Beethoven was in any sense trying to mimic the harp with his pizzicato writing in the opening movement of his Opus 74. Although the composer was already battling encroaching deafness, the first movement is all about the particular character of the plucked string resonance on these instruments, a responsibility that is passed around the ensemble and was sparklingly played and recorded here. Once again, Scobie was on fine robust and lyrical form with his lead line.

As in the closing Allegro of the Haydn, the Adagio second movement is as much about the spaces between the notes as the notes themselves, and here again the Maxwell displayed their mature, unhurried but decisive, approach to the score. The Finale is a very close rhythmic cousin of the opening of the Fifth Symphony, which Beethoven had premiered only a year earlier, and that was made very clear in the quartet’s coherent attack from bar one. Classic performances of two pivotal pieces.

Keith Bruce

Available to watch via horsecross.co.uk

Maxwell Quartet : Haydn / Scots Trad.

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Linn 

Listen to just the first two chords on this new Linn release by the Maxwell Quartet and you might be forgiven for thinking a good old Scottish ceilidh was about to spring into action. But these “gathering notes” are not the typical call-to-attention we associate with a traditional reel or jig, they are heralding the first of Haydn’s Op 74 string quartets, the spinal column of this cheerful new album featuring all three of the 1793 set.

How fortuitous is that primitive cadential opening to No 1, when the other side to this Classical offering is an interspersion of Scots folk music? The Maxwell’s have made a thing of mixing in their own arrangements of the latter in their live concerts. This Caledonian sprinkling is just as refreshing and invigorating in the recorded context.

But let’s start with the triptych of Haydn quartets, the Op 74 set, that fully complements the three Op 71s featured on the Maxwell’s Linn debut disc a couple of years ago, which also contains Scots fiddle tune arrangements. Both Haydn sets resulted from his first highly-successful London trip of 1791, where his experience of dedicated chamber music concerts (as opposed to the more restrained drawing room practices of his native Austria) elicited a spring-like creative response from the sexagenarian composer.

The Maxwells capture that buoyancy in all three works. The first C major quartet’s unquenchable exuberance, delivered with an enlivening grainy tonal edge, is tempered by moments of deep thinking, even probing darkness, such as the psychologically offsetting key shift that establishes the opening Allegro’s more plangent development. 

The second F major quartet has its own mysteries to fathom, its subtler nuances to shape, not so much in the two straightforward central movements as in the outermost ones, the boisterous finale in particular applying Mozartian trickery through mischievous structural and harmonic surprises, as if Haydn was honouring his recently deceased compatriot. The opening bars of the final G minor “Rider” quartet, the best known of the set, conjures up an enigmatic spirit more akin to – or rather preemptive of – Beethoven, which the Maxwells latch onto craftily, setting a high bar for a truly exhilarating performance.

Against all that are the Scots numbers, beautiful and wholesome arrangements by the ensemble itself, from the gracious father-son “classicism” of Niel and Nathaniel Gow (the latter’s melting air, Coilsfield House, raptly arranged), to the gorgeously lilting Fear a’ Bhàta, a frisky Shetland jig Da Full Rigged Ship and haunting swagger of The Burning of the Piper’s Hut, anonymous and thought to date back to the Highland Clearances. 

The magic of this album is the way these two musical traditions knit so effectively together. Haydn never visited Scotland (although he did arrange Burns’ songs for the 18th century Edinburgh publisher George Thomson) but if he had his music would have had Enlightenment Scotland dancing in the streets.
Ken Walton