The Edinburgh Quartet
The French Institute - 24/06/22
A welcome return - I have missed them!
That was my response when asked to review their first live concert since lockdown by the Edinburgh Quartet. True we have had streamed performances by the Quartet but it’s not the same as live music. As I explained in a previous review of the Quartet before lockdown, I have a special love of string quartets since I grew up in Harlow New Town where we were fortunate enough to have the Alberni String Quartet providing a musical education to many of us with 8 to 10 concerts a year. I loved sitting in the front row of the audience next to the cello feeling the music through my bones as well as listening through my ears. So on Friday night I positioned myself on the front row next to Mark Bailey’s cello and prepared to immerse myself in the music. I wasn’t disappointed, not least because they ended with my favourite string Quartet, the Dvorak American. Many years ago when I was an MEP and along with Nana Mouskouri in charge of music policy in the Parliament I hosted a concert for a world music conference with the record industry, the European Commission the European Parliament. I invited the Alberni String Quartet over from Harlow to Brussels and asked them to play the Dvorak American Quartet. Funnily enough they coupled this with a Haydn Quartet, just as the Edinburgh Quartet did tonight!
The Edinburgh Quartet are Scotland’s leading string quartet and indeed in their time one of Britain’s leading quartets. They have been in existence for 60 years with of course different personnel over the years, although cellist Mark Bailey has clocked up 37 of those 60 years. Recently they have been going through a change in personnel, not helped by COVID lockdowns and Brexit, which has made it more difficult for their former leader who came from the Netherlands. So I wasn’t quite sure which Edinburgh Quartet would turn up, but was delighted when Tristan Gurney led the quartet into the concert hall at the French Institute (which readers may know as the former committee rooms of the Scottish Parliament, or more likely for the very good French restaurant on the ground floor). It’s a very nice small concert hall with a lovely view of St Giles and holds about 80 people, just right for a string quartet.
Tristan is a former leader of the Edinburgh Quartet, but more recently took a break to concentrate on the Northern Symphonia in Newcastle. He is a fine musician and a great enthusiast for the music of string quartets, although he did admit to me some years ago that he had never read Vikram Seth’s great novel about a string quartet ‘Equal Music’. He said, “I’m too afraid!” He gave an enthusiastic intro to this concert, in particular the first work of the evening the Haydn Quartet Op 76 No. 5 Largo. The other members of the quartet were Justine Watts violin, Catherine Marwood viola and Mark Bailey cello, and although this might have been their first public concert in a while, it was clear that they had been rehearsing and playing together. They were in perfect harmony.
The Haydn quartet was, as Tristan said in his introduction, monumental and very difficult to play, and despite being earlier than Mozart or Beethoven it was in itself radical and experimental. This was followed by a recent work by New York composer Caroline Shaw who was inspired by a Haydn quartet to write ‘Entracte’, a variation on a minuet, Well it wasn’t ‘plinky plonky’ (my term for atonal works), but neither was it particularly memorable, other than for some techniques she used like “silent music” i.e. rubbing the strings without producing a sound. I suspect like many modern works it will disappear without trace.
This is not something you could say for my favourite string quartet, the Dvorak American, written by the composer in 1893 on a working visit to America. He spent some time in the Czech community in Spillville Iowa, where he wrote the American Quartet in 3 days! In 1983-4 I was a visiting professor at the University of Iowa and one Sunday morning was driving across Iowa and came into Spillville Iowa just as the American Quartet came on Iowa public radio, synchronistic or what? It is a wonderful work and incorporates influences of American music that Dvorak had picked up in his stay, needless to say it has become not only Dvorak’s best known quartet but one of the most popular of all string quartets. It was superbly played by the Edinburgh Quartet who are back with a bang. Let’s hope we can get back to normal this coming season with a full programme and in particular get Edinburgh University’s regular concerts reinstated. The Edinburgh Quartet were a mainstay of those, and tonight’s concert proved that in their 60th year they are ready to become a crucial part of Scotland’s musical life.
