They’re working in Scotland for over a month, mentoring the young people in Scotland’s Sistema project at the Raploch in Stirling during the week and visiting the clubs and societies of the Enterprise Music Scotland network from Portree to Dunfermline at weekends. The Millennium Quartet are themselves products of Venezuela’s much admired and copied music education project, alumni of the Simon Bolivar orchestra and a string foursome since 2000, as you may have guessed.
For the first of their public performances, the quartet appropriately teamed Dvorak’s American Quartet (No 12 in F) with the First Quartet of Argentinian Alberto Ginastera. The former is as attractively melodic as any Dvorak, but has some intriguing touches of modernism in the proto-minimalist viola figure of the slow second movement and the brisk, brief third. As the finale also showed, these are musicians happiest with swift tempos, bold and rhythmic rather than silky and lush.
To the Ginastera they brought a sound as expansive as their home continent, launching lustily into an opening movement that sounds like a train crossing the pampas. It is the violins of leader Ollantay Velasquez and Miguel Nieves that impress most, and nowhere more than on the tricky pizzicato Vivicissimo second movement. Its successor is marked in Spanish Calmo e poetico, but this was very robust poetry indeed. In the finale all four have tricky plucking to negotiate during a very funky off-beat dance conclusion: it seems unlikely we will get another opportunity to hear such idiosyncratic music played with such brio any time soon.
Then there is the charm of the handsome Velasquez and his broken English introductions to be added to the equation -- I fancy the Millennium Quartet will prove a popular attraction. Their next concert is in Glasgow University Concert Hall on Thursday at 1.10pm.
