Music

Castalian String Quartet

Perth Concert Hall

Keith Bruce, four stars

WHEN those who make it their business to encourage young musicians are unanimous in their endorsement of a young chamber group, there is usually a good reason for it.

Led by Finnish violinist Sini Simonen, with a French viola player, Charlotte Bonneton, and two British blokes, violinist Daniel Roberts and cellist Christopher Graves, the Castalian Quartet have been championed by the Young Classical Artists Trust and won a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship among a string of other established and highly-regarded stepping stones. They have played a string of dates for the music clubs and societies funded by Enterprise Music Scotland and will be appearing this summer at the East Neuk Festival in Fife, with one concert in partnership with pianist Christian Zacharias. Next month they are at London’s Wigmore Hall to play three of Haydn’s Opus 76 quartets.

They opened their lunchtime recital in Perth – which attracted the sort of attendance that suggests that the good word had already reached the Fair City – with the third of those, which has the Emperor’s Hymn (the tune used for the German national anthem), and variations upon it, as its slow second movement. The lightness of touch the lower strings brought to the first and third movements was particularly striking, set against a folkie edge to Simonen’s playing of the opening Allegro. Come the finale, however, it was the bold ensemble sound of the big opening chords that repeat at the end that stuck in the mind.

Schumann’s Opus 41 Quartets were a 23rd birthday present to his beloved Clara and come from the time of his first symphonic writing, which is particularly obvious in the hugely expressive arc of the second movement of the last of them, which the Castalians played here (Kilrenny Church will hear the first at East Neuk at the end of June). A much darker tone is required throughout, and Bonneton revelled in the brooding melody line she has in the Adagio, before some of Haydn’s influence reasserted itself in the comparatively brighter – but still far from unambiguous – finale.