Classic Music Live! Falkirk: Resol String Quartet
Falkirk Trinity Church - 23/02/24
Classic Music Live! Falkirk’s series of occasional chamber concerts brought the Resol String Quartet to Falkirk Trinity Church on the night of 23rd February, in a programme which, though diverse, might have been seen as themed around the exploration of chromaticism. This young quartet, originally founded in 2018 by musicians, passionate about chamber music, who met while studying at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, takes its name from the Catalan word for reflected sunlight. In the quartet’s publicity material, the first violinist appears as the Catalan musician Maria Vila Ariza but, for the Falkirk concert, they were led by Scottish violinist Richard Montgomery. The Montgomery family is well-known to my choir, Clackmannanshire Choral Society. Richard, an alumnus of St Mary's Music School in Edinburgh and the Royal Academy of Music in London, guested with the choir in April 2016, while his parents Donald, a violinist (and ophthalmologist), and Sheila, a fine soprano, guested with us in April 2010.
The quartet’s violist, Glasgow-based native of California Raphael Chinn, introduced the programme. He mentioned how the quartet is committed to music education and had been leading workshops in Maddiston Primary School earlier in the day.
The concert opened with Puccini’s elegiac ‘Crisantemi’. A chromatic melody, suggestive of the pain of loss and unfulfilled yearning, frames a central funerary oration. The playing was very expressive, with nice use of vibrato and subtle rubato, and phrasing that suggested anguished breathing. Very moving.
Mozart’s String Quartet No.19 in C major K.465, nicknamed ‘Dissonance’ for the mysterious tonally-indeterminate slow introduction to the first movement, is the last of the set of 6 quartets which he dedicated to Haydn. The sun came out for the ensuing Allegro, with lovely playful cantabile playing that evinced the joy of chamber music, and charming dialogue between the violins and answering from the viola. The first violin is prominent in Mozart’s writing, but the cello gets to lead the harmonic modulation from time to time. The dynamic balance was perfect and the moments of cheeky counterpoint were elegantly realised. The triple-time slow movement charmed with lovely cantabile playing and featured a nice duet between first violin and cello. The minuet, with whimsical chromatic slides and a playful mood, framed a darker C-minor trio. The playfulness continued with the finale, ducking and diving with key modulations and some very energetic agile scurrying for the first violin. Proper Mozart with plenty of that reflected sunshine.
It was a few years ago that I attended a concert, in Chryston Parish Church in North Lanarkshire, given by a young quartet led by Richard, in which a moving and insightful reading of Shostakovich’s iconic Quartet No.8 was performed, with an early Haydn and, I think, possibly Janáček’s ‘Intimate Letters’. I think that the quartet members also included at least one of the current Resol lineup, but I can’t be sure of that and the printed programme is buried somewhere in the attic. I do remember not only discussing the Shostakovich quartets with Richard, at a time when he was just discovering them, but also enjoying the perspective of a young man, remembering my own discovery through live performances by the Allegri Quartet and recordings by the Fitzwilliams in the 1970s. I note with pleasure that the Resol Quartet has been coached by the (modern) Fitzwilliam Qusrtet. I mention this because the final work in the Falkirk programme was Shostakovich’s 1946 Quartet No.3, a work that foreshadows the Eighth in its preoccupation with the trauma of war, at a time when the emotions were still very raw.
The opening Allegretto seems carefree at first with two pleasant themes supported by gentle harmonies, complete with neo-classical exposition repeat. The development, though, is an increasingly anxious double fugue in which the harmony becomes increasingly non-functional until a strident stretto brings us back to a more conventional recapitulation and a cheeky faster coda. But the secret is out: all is not well. Like the Eighth Quartet, there are two scherzi, but in the Third Quartet, it is the first of these that is the waltz, but what a waltz! – a grim waltz for robots, as a war machine grinds into action, while troops almost comically and furtively tiptoe into position for an attack. A baleful chromatic series of sighs from the viola over morendo dissonance shows that the ambush has been laid. The violence is unleashed in the third movement, alternating 2/4 and 3/4 bars providing an unsettling rhythm to brutal power chords, savage syncopation and chromatic snarls, finally coming to a sudden stop. The elegiac Adagio that follows combines elements of a funeral oration, a lament and a funeral march, the first violin line charged with voicing most of the emotive content, finally breaking down and sobbing. The last 16 bars of utter desolation are left to the viola and cello, linking attacca to the Moderato finale, an initially untroubled 6/8 melody seeming to suggest that ‘life goes on’. A second 2/4 theme is even more insouciant at first, seeming to confirm that the nightmare is over. But this is Shostakovich, so it returns with a vengeance of triggered memory, the violins sounding a shrill discordant alarm as viola and cello fortississimo intone the lament from the fourth movement, then taken up by the violins. When the grief has spent its fury, the opening theme returns muted and in the minor key. Over a sustained major chord, the first violin sings an ethereal valediction, soaring up to the instrument’s highest register. Three soft pizzicato major chords confirm: the nightmare is finally over.
The Resol Quartet really got under the skin of this profound music and delivered a performance as finely nuanced and impactful as I have heard, matching the description above in every detail. It would be a huge undertaking, but they should consider recording all 15 of the Shostakovich quartets. I’d buy it.