Llyr Williams/Elias Quartet
Llyr Williams/Elias Quartet
City Hall, Glasgow
Michael Tumelty
WILL the day come when we stop parcelling Beethoven's music into three chronologically-convenient periods? Probably not; it's just too useful to bracket the music into "early", "middle" and "late" periods; and if somebody questions the practice it's easy to stitch in stylistic developments to validate the labelling.
Yet it only takes one perceptive, genuinely-original performer to set the package unravelling. In Glasgow's intensive weekend survey of Beethoven's music, with performances shared between the Elias String Quartet and pianist Llyr Williams, that dismantling nearly came about, thanks to the unfailing questioning by the Welshman of templates, assumptions and preconceptions. That man Williams doesn't have a second-hand thought in his head.
This was a survey of "middle-period" Beethoven. Someone should have told Williams. Each of the three sonatas he played, the opus 26 in A flat and the two opus 27 Sonatas, including the Moonlight, was off the leash in sheer freedom of expression.
Indeed, I sat gobsmacked during his performance of the A flat Sonata, thinking that this performance was a study in texturing and sonority, with a dash of serenity lifting the music light years away from any "period". Few pianists can provoke thought in the way Llyr Williams does.
The Elias Quartet provoked a bit of thought themselves with their performance of the great F Major Rasumovsky Quartet: should that wonderfully-long cello theme that opens the piece really be played that fast? I'm unconvinced. It loses breadth, nobility, and not a little of its glamour if it seems urgent and over-paced.
The value of their post-concert coda account of the opus 95 Quartet, however, in an punchy, concise performance, was incalculable.
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