Festival Music
Danish String Quartet
Queen’s Hall
Michael Tumelty
four stars
THE Danish String Quartet, with some exceptionally-focused playing, brought the Queen’s Hall series to a close on Saturday with a rich programme featuring two classics, two native composers from their homeland and one French horn player.
I was much taken with the tiny, seven-minute string quartet – Quartetto breve – by Per Norgard, once a bit of a bad lad in contemporary music, now an elder statesman in his country’s culture. It’s a single-movement, extremely well-defined piece, as effective in its slow music, gently punctuated by pizzicato sounds, as it is in its livelier, dance-like music: a wee cracker of a piece, concisely played.
Ralf Wallin’s Swans Kissing went off in totally different directions, conjuring all manner of images in my mind, many nature-based. There were some fantastic quartet effects, not least the sense of the music at the end evaporating into the ether, though I did part company with the composer at the appearance of the phrase “fractal algorithms” in the explanatory programme note. Fractal algorithms? Aye, right.
These apart, it was classic performances of classics from the mighty Danes, with SCO principal horn Alec Frank Gemmill joining the quartet in a delightful outing for Mozart’s Horn Quintet that featured gorgeous melodies and all the horn acrobatics you could wish for at lunchtime. Am I right in thinking that we don’t hear the Horn Quintet as often as it deserves? I wonder why not?
Thereafter, a meat-on-the-bone performance of Beethoven’s second opus 59 Quartet powered the concert to its close. There’s something elemental in that great Rasumovsky quartet, something utterly uncompromising; this superlative performance had the music by the neck.
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