East Neuk Festival: Belcea Quartet and Friends 1,2 & 3

Crail Church - 29/06/23, 30/06/23, 01/07/23

Bertrand Chamayou, piano

Belcea String Quartet

Diyang Mei, viola | Jean-Guihen Queyras, cello

The evening concerts of the first three days of the East Neuk Festival were in the lovely Romanesque Crail Church, whose raised altar area had been furnished with a Steinway grand.  All three concerts featured the supremely talented Belcea String Quartet, though only the third of these programmed a work from the quartet repertoire, the Debussy.  All also featured French pianist Bertrand Chamayou, playing solo in the first half of the first two concerts and joining with the quartet in the second half of the third concert for a performance of César Franck’s Piano Quintet in F minor, in a change to the advertised programme.  The second halves of the first two concerts were devoted to performances of the two glorious Brahms sextets, for which the quartet was joined by Chinese violist Diyang Mei and French cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras.

Turning first to Bertrand Chamayou’s solo contribution, the concert of the 29th opened with a selection of three pieces from the second book of Liszt’s ‘Les Années de pèlerinage’, charting a year of artistic and cultural pilgrimage in Italy by the composer and his mistress.  ‘Sposalizio’, inspired by a Raphael painting of The Marriage of the Virgin, evoked church bells, the sounds of running water and a hymn like solemnity, notwithstanding two passionate climaxes of high romanticism.  The sound from the Steinway in the church’s live acoustic was phenomenal, while Bertrand’s expressive and impassioned playing simultaneously painted a vivid picture and told an engaging story.  The same was true of ‘Sonetto 123 del Petrarca’, with an added lyricism, evoking the ups and downs of a love affair.  The third, the epic ‘Après une lecture du Dante: Fantasia quasi Sonata,’ is a huge quasi-improvisatory depiction of the contrasts between Heaven and Hell, the latter holding the greatest fascination with some of Liszt’s most demonic writing.  The phrasing and articulation of this nigh-orchestral music were flawlessly breathtaking.  More vivid sonic picture-painting followed on 30th, but with a French Impressionistic feel, in the form of two Debussy Preludes and Ravel’s ‘Gaspard de la Nuit’.  ‘La cathédrale engloutie’ evokes the ghostly sound of bells, organ and chanting monks from a legendary submerged cathedral off the Breton island of Ys, while ‘La Terrasse des audiences du clair de lune’ is Debussy’s slightly satirical imagining, from a brief mention in a newspaper article, of a feature of the durbar at which George V was crowned Emperor of India.  The three macabre pieces of Gaspard were inspired by three of the poems in a collection by Aloysius Bertrand.  ‘Ondine’depicts a water nymph who tries to lure unwary observers to a watery grave, sounds of cascading water building to a mesmerising intensity, while an element of menace lurks in the underlying texture.  ‘Gibet’ depicts the gruesome spectacle of the corpse of a hanged man suspended from a gibbet outside the walls of a desert city while a bell tolls.  Technically demanding though these two movements are, they are as nothing compared to the final piece, ‘Scarbo’, depicting the nocturnal antics of a malevolent goblin.  I first heard ‘Gaspard’performed in the RDS in Dublin in the late 70s by Pascal Rogé.  It blew me away then.  This was even better.

The two Brahms Sextets have been firm favourites since first hearing them in my teens, with No.1 having been slightly longer in my ken and more frequently performed.  Brahms’ line-up: two each of violin, viola and cello, coupled with his tendency to score densely, can lead to a rather plummy texture, but so delicious are the melodies and harmonies, and so fully exploited is the scope for variety of pairings for musical dialogue, that this really doesn’t seem to matter, at least not to me.  I must take issue with an assertion in the (otherwise excellent) programme notes that Brahms was the first since Boccherini a century before to use this 2,2,2 instrumentation.  Swedish composer Ludvig Norman’s String Sextet in A major, Op. 18 (1850) uses it a decade before Brahms (and it’s well worth a listen too).

Rich in aural pleasures though the experiencing of live chamber music can be, there are also visual elements that add immeasurably to the experience.  The eye contact of players shaping a shared phrase or a nuanced response, the smile as harmony gels even better than in rehearsal, and a myriad other visual clues to the joy of music making – these can be shared with an audience in a way that is harder to achieve with a larger, conducted ensemble.  We are drawn in; we become active participants in the art.  Our lives are enriched.  I make no secret of the fact that I consider the string quartet to be the optimum ensemble for the chamber music experience.  But the Brahms sextets: they defy my assertion – Brahms, as in so many other ways, squares the circle with these works.  With, of course, the right musicians.  At the East Neuk, we had the right musicians.  A nice touch was the way that the guests changed roles between the two works, Diyang playing first viola in the first sextet but second in the second. Jean-Guihen playing second cello in the first sextet but first in the second.

A leisurely tempo choice for the beginning of the first sextet gave room for the phrasing to breathe and to pick up the pace for the exposition repeat.  The dialogues between first violin and first viola, then first violin and first cello, at the start of the development, were perfect.  The movement concludes with yet another of my top 10 codas, a pizzicato passage terminating in a perfect arco cadence.  Scrumptious.  Nobody writes a set of theme and variations like Brahms and the second movement is one of his best.  The fifth variation, suddenly in the major key, where the violins play two-note phrases high in their register, the violas comment melodically and cello pizzicato rounds off each phrase, is Brahms at his best and always a ‘goosebump’ moment for me.  The scherzo, a genial leisurely Ländler, gives way to a wilder, abandoned trio, before a reprise of the scherzo and a dashing codabased on the trio.  The finale, a leisurely rondo, has a storytelling vibe.  At the close, the first viola, which has had a starring role throughout, sets off at a quickening trot, joined by the others in a dashing rush to the finish line.  Good clean fun.

The second sextet seems sunnier in outlook, though not without the occasional cloud shadow cast.  First viola starts with a slow trill, the ranging first theme seeming to grow organically; the gorgeous second them on first cello was beautifully introduced by Jean-Guihen.  After observing the exposition repeat, the mysterious start to the development with its seemingly indeterminate key is quite daring for the young Brahms, but the summery feeling is restored ultimately.  The unhurried idyllic scherzo, not in triple time, in a major key but with phrase ends in the minor, has an air of mystery, dispelled briefly by the Presto giocoso trio section, then returning before a dashing coda in the minor key.  The slow movement opens anxiously with reference to the opening of the first movement.  Mysterious sotto voce and an agitated passage owe a lot to late Beethoven, after which a more idyllic mood asserts itself.  A scurrying beginning to the finale gives way to a tripping, rhythmic passage and a more rhapsodic melody.  Brahms flexes his contrapuntal muscles with some fugal writing.  A lovely sul-G melody for first violin leads to the final pages and a scurrying coda.  Top-drawer Brahms beautifully played.  The two cellists exchanged glances and smiles throughout, while violist Diyang was visually and aurally responsive to everyone else.  An unalloyed pleasure for performers and audience alike.

Diyang opened the third concert of the series with a whimsical novelty piece: Garth Knox’ Quartet for One.  Commissioned by violist Laurence Power from the violist composer and written during the 2020 Lockdown, a single nervous violist performs a four-movement (without a break) ‘quartet’ by assuming the somewhat stereotypical characters of the other musicians as well as his own.  The stage was set as if for an actual quartet.  Diyang started in the viola seat, moved to the cello seat for the second movement, lyrical music interspersed with viola comments, thence to the discreetly sentimental second violin-led ‘trio’ and finally assuming the place and identity of an exhibitionist leader, with four distinct musical personalities and lines multiplexed on one viola.  Extraordinary.

Then, at last, an ‘actual’ quartet, the Debussy.  The Belcea Quartet comprises Romanian leader Corina Belcea, Korean-Australian second violinist Suyeon Kang, Polish violist Krzysztof Chorzelski and French cellist Antoine Lederlin.  Their consummate collective musicianship in the Brahms sextets had raised expectations of excellence in the quartet repertoire and these were not confounded.  Suyeon played from sheet music, all the others from electronic tablets.  A firm pulse in the first movement kept the rhapsodic elements together without being metronomic.  There was great delicacy in the lighter parts, but plenty of oomph when it was required.  The pace and tempo managed to sound free, but of course were very controlled, with expert use of tenuto at transitions of colour or mood.  The scherzo, with its delicious interplay of rhythmic pizzicato and tripping arco elements and dramatic recitative-like central section, was quite superb.  The sweet pathos of the slow movement’s principal melody was very touching, while the troubled viola recitative in the central section, over comforting modal chording, was equally moving.  The finale starts with a contemplation of earlier material, before the cello launches a brief accelerated fugal passage, establishing a pulse that drives the momentum of the rest of the movement with a sense of indomitability of spirit.  A great finish concludes the work.

Norwegian violinist Vilde Frang having withdrawn from the festival due to circumstances beyond her control, the advertised Chausson piece was replaced by César Franck’s 3-movement Piano Quintet in F minor, with Bertrand Chamayou at the keyboard.  I couldn’t recall having heard it before but assumed I would find bits of it familiar.  I didn’t.  It is unmistakably Franckian, with melodic chromaticism and themes recurring in fresh guises in cyclic form.  But it is uncharacteristically thickly-textured and charged with melodrama and passion and, at first, I found it (quoting directly from my notes) “overblown, turgid, not a fave”.  But it was played with such conviction and full drama and oomph, that it began to grow on me and, about two-thirds of the way through the first movement, I had written “maybe it’s OK”.  The movement ended quietly.  The slow movement is no less dramatic, in slow triple metre shifting between minor and major keys, bold block chords at a climax, but also an elegiac passage of great tenderness, again ending quietly.   The fiery driven finale has elements of a macabre waltz and held a grim fascination.  Even in the closing bars, it wavered between major and minor, before nailing down the minor chord at the end.  It was certainly an extraordinary performance and I am very glad to have experienced it.  I remain conflicted about the piece.  If it is Franck attempting to channel Liszt, I can only react “but why?”.  Yet, on its own terms, it is a monumental piece, if somewhat full-on.  I can’t imagine it will ever be a favourite.