Tag Archives: Music at Paxton

Dudok Quartet

Posted on by

Music at Paxton, Paxton House, Berwickshire

The Dudok Quartet Amsterdam made an interesting point when introducing themselves to this Music at Paxton audience. Noted for their progressive approach to string quartet performance, cellist David Faber explained that the ensemble’s artistic policy is not so much to limit itself to pure string quartet music per se, but rather to play music that befits a string quartet. 

What that does is to free them from the confines of a purpose-built repertoire “invented” in the mid-18th century, most notably by Haydn, and instead let them utilise a wider spread of music from further back in time transcribed for the genre. So this opening festival programme began with a surprise: a miscellany of pre-Baroque miniatures dating from between 1200 and 1600, all examples of vocal music recast for strings.

We weren’t actually expecting any of this, the advertised Piatti Quartet having cancelled last-minute due to travel issues, but swiftly replaced by the young Dutch players who had hot-footed it from Yorkshire’s Ryedale Festival. Any disappointment gave way instantly to revelation.

That said, the bulk of the Dudok’s programme was mainstream, the clean textures of Mozart’s final Prussian Quartet dominating the opening half, Tchaikovsky’s Third Quartet filling the post-interval slot with a fulsome flood of Russian Romanticism. In a further gesture of originality, the Quartet applied a series of differently-styled bows reflecting the relevant musical periods: Baroque bows for the early music, a later linear design for Classical Mozart, and modern design for the Tchaikovsky. There was certainly a distinctiveness in the results, but whether that was actually down to the bows is a moot question. 

Suffice to say, overall, that an intriguing and generally lively programme was also one of mixed success.

It all began with a buzz, an arrangement of Perotin’s Viderunt Omnes whose austere 12th century primitivism translated arrestingly into something resembling a belligerent pre-echo of Bela Bartok-meets-Steve Reich – a form of rustically-charge minimalism, considerably more gutsy than the version of this piece once favoured by the Kronos Quartet.

Then, with “just intonation” principles applied to Machaut’s Kyrie (from his Messe de Notre Dame), the resultant tuning distortions played mischief with our modern-day sensitivities, fascinating in one sense, grotesque in another. And finally, where Gesualdo’s music generally comes with in-built futuristic dissonance, his madrigal Deh come invan sospiro, in this string version, and for all its incongruous harmonic shifts, seemed strangely emasculated. 

No such quibbles with the ensuing Mozart, granting the first genuine opportunity for Dudok to show their real worth. This was a stylish performance that pitted 18th century Viennese grace and charm against the growing maturity of Mozart’s quartet writing at this late stage in his short life. Now and again, its focus dimmed and details were scurried over, particularly the inner textures, but on the whole there was a joyousness, daringly picturesque at times.

Tchaikovsky’s Quartet, with its sublime and funereal slow movement, transported us to more heated realms of expression, which the ensemble responded to vigorously, if occasionally short on full-blooded passion and complete rhythmic unanimity. Where they consistently excelled was in capturing the spontaneous thrills that ignite the frenetic scherzo and distantly muted Andante. 

Prefacing the quartet with a transcription of Lasky’s Aria from the same composer’s Eugene Onegin was tasteful and touching, but probably unnecessary. A Shostakovich encore, on the other hand, was fully justified.

Ken Walton

Music at Paxton runs till Sunday 30 July. Full programme details at http://www.musicatpaxton.co.uk

Music at Paxton

Posted on by

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