CALL it naivety, but there should be no surprises left from the young musicians of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland: I have reviewed them many times each season, in all their formats, from recitalists to chamber musicians and instrumentalists, from opera and ensemble musicians to full-blown symphony orchestra players.
Yet, despite the familiarity I feel with them all (which is fake, as they wouldn't know me if I fell over them in the street) what one group produced for the Cottier Chamber Project on Wednesday night carried a certain shock value in the quality of the musical product. It wasn't just good, or even excellent: it was superbly organised and structured. Whether it was instinctive or intellectual, the music played by the award-winning Csengele Quartet and ultra-crisp Canadian pianist Pearl-Lynne Chen was delivered with style, confidence and a bulls-eye combination of compactness, clarity of thought and certainty of trajectory.
Actually, it's the thought that counts. It's all very well to be a wizard on your instrument, but if there's no brainwork behind it, the music will just sprawl. And brainwork was everywhere in the Csengele's performance of Schumann's Piano Quintet with Chen, so neat, tight, penetrating and sensitive it made me weep; and with such acuity in Thomas Wilson's Fourth String Quartet that every rhythmic quiver and expressive sigh in the music seemed hyper-alert.
The performances were actually a thing of wonder, a gloriously democratic mix with Romanian leader Eva Demeter a driving force, Lithuanian second violinist Ula Kinderyte a source of immense stability with golden playing that would melt ice, and bullet-proof Scottish cellist David Munn and awesome violist Christine Anderson providing bedrock support.
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