GIVEN the Brodsky Quartet's close association with Glasgow and the Royal Conservatoire over the past five years, it was right the city should receive a slice of the musical cake currently being shared around Britain's institutions to celebrate the group's incredible 40 years at the top.
So yesterday, in the Brodsky's lunchtime concert, broadcast live as part of Radio 3's Scotland Week, we expected something special. We received something supreme.
Shostakovich's Fourth String Quartet, wisely suppressed by the composer until Stalin was dead and buried, is a rare bird: Serious music for serious ears to hear, with loads of Jewish resonances (ergo the suppression). The Brodskys unfolded it like a narrative packed with imagery. Without sidelining the folk influences, the group set the music off like a spinning top which gradually slowed down, stretching expression and allowing the bendy tonality to give the music a feeling of going slightly askew, rather like a top keeling over as it runs out of momentum.
It was an extraordinary sensation, countered by the tenderness of the sad song in the slow movement and the subdued muttering in the music that followed. At the end, in an eternal quiet that seemed to stretch to infinity, nobody moved, no applause interrupted, and silence prevailed.
After that the Brodskys exploded into activity with an electric, forward-looking account of Debussy's String Quartet where you could feel the composer haring away from tradition as fast as his imagination could carry him. The encore, an exquisite quartet arrangement of Debussy's song Bon soir, was, as a gentleman leaving the building remarked, "sublime".
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