East Neuk Festival
Belcea Quartet/Pavel Haas Quartet/Elisabeth Leonskaya
The Bowhouse, by St Monans/Kilrenny Church
Keith Bruce
Four stars
WHEN concerts from the 15th East Neuk Festival are broadcast by BBC Radio 3 later this month, it may be that - for all that it was less desirable at other points in the day - the thrumming of torrential rain on the roof of The Bowhouse adds a certain ambience to the mesmeric performance by the Pavel Haas Quartet of Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet. It was a highlight of the sort of repertoire that is at the heart of the festival and which this year featured a truly stellar line-up of chamber musicians.
On Friday, the Czech quartet had added the Belcea Quartet’s viola player Krzysztof Chorzelski for Dvorak’s “American” Quintet, which owes more to his homeland than to the New World, although there did sound to be echoes of vaudeville minstrelsy in the second movement here. After pianist Elisabeth Leonskaya (who had played her own concert in The Bowhouse on Thursday evening) dispatched Schubert’s well-known Impromptu in G-flat, she joined the Belcea Quartet for the Opus 34 Brahms Piano Quintet in a partnership that didn’t really achieve the balance it required, with the keyboard both too loud in the Andante second movement and outside the conversation later, so that the final bars were not in perfect sync.
The Belceas were better heard the following morning in Kilrenny, with the first of two exemplary performances of quartets by Josef Haydn, Beethoven’s final essay in the form, Opus 135, and a wonderfully robust dramatic account of Janacek’s first, the “Kreutzer Sonata”, which made clear how much the minimalists owed to its phrasing and the modernists to its sonic palette. Sadly, the BBC microphones were not in place to capture that one.
The two quartets came together on Saturday night for the precocious Felix Mendelssohn’s astonishing Octet, a work that set the bar so high composers have been reluctant to use the same forces since. With Corina Belcea in the soloist’s chair, the Pavel Haas Quartet’s Veronika Jaruskova was in section leader mode, for a delicious account of the work during which the weather, thankfully, abated.
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