Tag Archives: Pavel Haas Quartet

East Neuk at 20

Posted on by

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

East Neuk turns 20

Posted on by

Tickets are now on general sale for the 20th East Neuk Festival, on Fife’s picturesque Forth estuary shoreline, which includes a celebration of the Elie Church concert that inspired its first programme, featuring some of the players involved in that event. A group led by violinist Alexander Janiczek, former leader of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and including ex-SCO players Ursula Leveaux on bassoon and Alec Frank-Gemmill on horn and current SCO first cello Philip Higham, plays Beethoven’s Septet on the festival’s closing day, June 29. The 2025 performance is at noon in St Ayle’s, Cellardyke.

The main threads of this summer’s bill of fare are the late quartets of Beethoven, the compositions of Schubert and the versatile musicianship of festival regular Sean Shibe.

The Edinburgh guitarist is the soloist for the opening Bowhouse concert by the SCO under principal guest conductor Andrew Manze on the evening of Wednesday June 25. Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez is followed by Schubert’s Sixth Symphony. Shibe also gives three intimate recitals in Anstruther venues on Saturday June 28, playing lute, classical guitar and electric guitar.

Three Schubert song cycles are performed over three days in Crail Parish Church, pianist Joseph Middleton accompanying baritone James Newby for Die Schone Mullerin, tenor Mark Padmore for Wintereise and both for Schwanengesang.

The Beethoven quartets are in the hands of the Elias, Castalian, Belcea and Pavel Haas Quartets, all four of whom come together for the closing concert at the Bowhouse, which includes a new commission from composer Sally Beamish, written for four string quartets.

Other attractions include festival debuts for London saxophonist Tom Smith and his Septet and traditional musician Katherine Tickell with her band The Darkening, oud virtuoso Nizar Rohana and jazz pianist Euan Stevenson.

Full details and booking information is available at eastneukfestival.com

East Neuk Festival (1)

Posted on by

Although most of its loyal audience comes to the East Neuk Festival to hear world-class performances of classical chamber music in beautiful, intimate acoustics – particularly some of the lovely churches in that corner of Fife – artistic director Svend McEwan-Brown has long since widened the scope of the event to embrace other spaces, outdoor events and contemporary and world music and jazz, and the audience has demonstrated an appetite for those as well.

And while it is a remarkable blessing that some of the first rank performances of the work of Czech composers by members of the Pavel Haas Quartet and pianist Boris Giltburg had previously been heard only by those attending the Prague Spring Festival, ticket-holders were also able to see and hear freshly-minted work make its first-ever appearance.

On Sunday afternoon, the repurposed agricultural shed near St Monans, the Bowhouse, hosted the largest number of musicians it saw over the course of the event when the Scottish Chamber Orchestra played the last of a run of four dates under the baton of its former principal bassoonist, Peter Whelan. For East Neuk they were joined by soprano Anna Dennis, singing two arias from Mozart’s opera Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail, with the fullest expression of anguish (in Traurigkeit) and anger (Martern aller Artern). As in the two symphonies on either side of those songs, Haydn’s 82nd “The Bear” and Beethoven’s 8th, the balance in the room and the detail in the performances was superb, the singer and the wind soloists, of which Whelan was once a star member, on top form.

Early on Friday evening, however, the same space had proved just as appropriate for a unique combination of amplified music, juggling and dance under the title Light the Lights, a beautifully presented hour of the music of Bach, Steve Reich and Nico Muhly that was as much a feast for the eyes as the ears.

With the indisposition of guitarist Sean Shibe, the musical responsibility rested on the shoulders of violinist Benjamin Baker, who not only performed that wide compositional repertoire, but was the physical narrative guide through much of it, starting with a Bach-playing amble from the back of the hall that was impressive enough on its own.

Thereafter he was joined by six members of Gandini Juggling who gave visual expression to some of the compositional techniques used by Reich with clubs and balls moving through the air, in and out of synchronicity. At the conclusion of the performance they added a programmed lighting element to the mix for Reich’s Electric Counterpoint, using recorded music.

In between, the jugglers added solo work and a wry nod to Ligeti’s 100 metronomes while Baker played a movement of Reena Esmail’s Darshan and combined forces with dancer James Pett on an interpretation of Muhly’s A Long Line, for violin and electronics. Much of this had a “work in progress” feel to it, but the sense of being admitted to the creative process was the joy of it, especially with the expressive choreography of Pett, who has a hinterland of work with Richard Alston and Wayne McGregor.

Rihab Azar by Neil Hanna Photography

In Anstruther Town Hall on Friday evening, clarinettist Julian Bliss brought a whole suite of box-fresh arrangements by vibraphone player Lewis Wright that extended his jazz excursion into surprisingly contemporary areas. The advance publicity for the Hooray for Hollywood programme had suggested the group was following its acclaimed Gershwin programme with film music from the “Golden Age” of screen musicals. In fact some of the highlights of the set were from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the 2011 movie Midnight in Paris, which adapted Bechet and Django Reinhardt for modern ears. There were classics from the Great American Songbook as well, but Bliss and his cohorts produce a disciplined sound that is a long way from the pub trad band.

As far as East Neuk’s core activity is concerned, this was a year of great riches, with pianists Elisabeth Leonskaya, Pavel Kolesnikov, Samson Tsoy, Boris Giltburg and Christian Zacharias all featured. Leonskaya played Schubert Trios with violinist Liza Ferschtman and young cellist Ivan Karizna in which the beautiful tone of the latter was a discovery, while Kolesnikov and Tsoy explored the same composer’s writing for four hands.

Although no dedication was made, there was surely a nod towards the situation in Ukraine with the Pavel Haas Quartet prefacing its Kilrenny Church concert with Joseph Suk’s nationalist Meditation on the Old Czech Hymn, St Wenceslas. Followed by Korngold’s Quartet No 3 and Janacek’s “Intimate Letters”, this was the Pavel Haas on fertile home territory, the muscular playing of leader Veronika Jaruskova and cellist Peter Jarusek tempered by the newest recruit Luosha Fang, whose viola was so central to the latter.

In Crail Church, the violin and cello couple were joined by Giltburg for two Dvorak trios: the 1876 No 2 is more conventional but less often heard and the 1891 No 4 “Dumky” was given a beautifully-shaped performance, with a particularly memorable steady pulse in the fourth movement. The same venue saw the full quartet joined by Giltburg to play piano quintets of Brahms and Dvorak, as featured on their acclaimed Supraphon recordings.

It is St Ayle Church in Anstruther that often houses other steps away from the mainstream at East Neuk, and it was home this year to the virtuosic oud player Rihab Azar. Combining with bassist Dudley Phillips and percussionist Beth Higham-Edwards, she provided a whistle-stop tour of the contemporary chamber music of Egypt, Iran and her native Syria in a refreshing and relaxing Sunday lunchtime recital that was in some ways a bridge between the core canon of East Neuk and the festival’s more radical exploratory side.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Gandini Juggling by Neil Hanna