Music

Maxwell String Quartet, Cottier's Theatre, Glasgow

Michael Tumelty

Four stars

A GREAT feature of the Cottier Chamber Project is the focus it gives on the repertoire: not throwing spotlights on performers, occasions or events per se, but on the actual music. Nobody knows better than musicians the highways and byways of the music written for their instruments. So the question is not just: do you want to play in the Cottier Chamber Project? It's more like: do you want to play in the CCP and what have you got to bring?

And that was a pertinent issue in the early evening concert on Tuesday from the young, eager and increasingly well-placed Maxwell String Quartet who produced two string quartets that effectively are rarities, in Shostakovich's Tenth and Carl Nielsen's First. Hands up: who knew the Nielsen? When was the last time you heard it? How often have you heard Shostakovich's Tenth in concert?

The Maxwells were brilliant in Nielsen's First Quartet, which, though obviously based on native folk material and traditional elements, was punctuated with little shocks of volatility that clearly hinted at seed elements of the volcanic eruptions of music to come from the great Dane. And that was really worth hearing.

As too was the Maxwell Quartet's Shostakovich 10, where the group had a fine command of the first movement's elliptical material, and where they caught the confidentiality of the music by scarcely letting it raise its voice, which thus gave huge impact to the slashing attack of the second movement: a great quartet, given its Western premiere in 1965 (and recorded) by the Weller Quartet, founded by Viennese violinist and conductor Walter Weller, who has just died.