EIF: Isidore String Quartet at The Hub
The Hub - 25/08/23
The genial, relaxed surroundings of The Hub played host to Banff competition-winning young American group, the Isidore String Quartet, on the evening of Friday 25th August. On the programme were just two profound works in A minor, Bartók’s First Quartet of 1909 and Beethoven’s Op.132 of 1825. The players wore casual attire and played from digital tablets, as is becoming increasingly common, rather than sheet music. Violist Devin Moore addressed the audience, telling us how the players had met and formed a quartet at the Julliard School in 2019 pre-pandemic, but had had to stop their music making during lockdown. However, they had resumed and gone on to win the Banff International String Quartet Competition in 2022. He said that the quartet encouraged the audience to feel free to experience the music however they wanted and to feel free to move around the performing space should they so wish.
Bartók’s First Quartet, as introduced by cellist Joshua McClendon, was the first piece the young quartet had begun to play post-pandemic. It charts the young Bartók’s state of mind with his unrequited feelings for the violinist Stefi Geyer, in three movements played without a break, increasing in pace and lightness of mood, initially dejected and miserable, then coming to terms with reality and awareness of the beauty of the natural world, and finally ‘moving on’, the lightest mood portrayed, as so often with Bartók, with Hungarian folk melody. The playing was rich and characterful, vividly tracing the shifting moods with their impetuous mercurial variability, showing us not the mature balanced integrated master of subtlety, but a more romantic figure on a voyage of self-discovery. It was pretty thrilling and reminded me a bit of the original young Takács Quartet when they started out (their performance of Bartók’s Fourth Quartet is still my yardstick – now I want to hear the Isidores in the Fourth – I bet they’d ace it).
Beethoven’s Op.132 was introduced by first violinist Adrian Steele. It was written after recovery from a life-threatening intestinal disorder and the longest of its 5 movements, the 3rd, is headed ‘Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart’ ("Holy song of thanksgiving of a convalescent to the Deity, in the Lydian mode”). The various Greek modes place the semitone intervals of the scale differently to the major and minor scales of our so-called “classical” traditions, and the Lydian mode has the particular peculiarity that the note we call the “dominant” is not found in the modal scale, so harmonies do not resolve conventionally and, even when a phrase ends on the tonic, it sounds as if is searching for a delayed more perfect resolution. The resultant harmonic incompleteness and ambiguity is exploited by Beethoven to let the audience imagine itself eavesdropping on a music directed at a supernatural listener.
The first movement grows from a tentative 4-note germ into an anxious discursive modified sonata form. The tone, phrasing and dynamic balance were stunningly good, while flawless intonation and controlled vibrato kept the texture open and clear allowing the fullest appreciation of Beethoven’s finest counterpoint. A relaxed cantabile reading lent an element of gracious elegance to the triple-time second movement, while the bagpipe emulation in its central section added a note of bucolic charm.
But of course I was waiting for the ‘Dankgesang’. It was utterly sublime. The modal chording in the chorale sections were of such perfectly balanced unanimity as to suggest being performed on a single instrument, such as an organ (yet unmistakably string music). The mutually responsive phrasing in the ‘Neue Kraft fühlend’’ (feeling renewed strength) sections, especially the dialogue between the two violins, Adrian Steele and Phoenix Avalon, was absolutely exquisite. And did the closing bars raise a tear or two? Oh yes. Unforgettable.
The briefly irreverent ‘Alla marcia’ fourth movement was played with character, but the anguished quasi-operatic first violin recitative which interrupts it to usher in the finale was as dramatic and virtuosic as I have heard. The finale, songlike but troubled, visits similar concerns as the first movement but does part the clouds for a major key coda, bringing a top-drawer reading of Beethoven’s Op.132 to its sunny close.
At the risk of appearing a stick in the mud, I would like to add that I was pleased that the invitation to wander round the performance space during the performance went largely unheeded – when eavesdropping on Beethoven’s address to God, I have no wish to have the spell broken by footsteps.
This Festival has seen a lot of top-quality late Beethoven. I strongly approve.