EIF: Gringolts Quartet
A tale of two uneven Quartets.
The Gringolts Quartet were making their second visit to the festival; at their first visit in 2017 they were relatively unknown but got rave reviews for their performance. Since then they have established an international reputation both for their concerts all over the world and their recordings, which have won a number of prizes. Their membership is a testament to the international nature of music with members from four different countries coming together to make music. My mind goes back to the days when I was an MEP and in charge of music policy in the European Parliament; we had helped arrange a concert to celebrate the launch of the Euro and Claudio Abbado, the great conductor, paused before he began to conduct Beethoven’s 9th, “You politicians have been meeting in the European Parliament and speaking your languages in discussing important events, but this music is the real language of Europe”! The founder and leader of the quartet Ilya Gringolts himself is an international testimony to music, educated in St Petersburg, then in the Juilliard in New York, then as a BBC Young Musician, he is based in Zurich where he teaches and leads his quartet, made up of Romanian viola player Silvio Simonescu, Armenian violinist Anahit Kurtikyan (whom he is married to) and German cellist Claudius Herrmann.
The Gringolts began with Mozart’s Quartet No 13 in D minor K173, written in Vienna when Mozart was 17 and on a visit with his father. He was trying to get work in Vienna to escape the confines of Salzburg and wrote 6 quartets in 3 months! It’s a rather slow melancholy work and with some lovely music and is very short, about 15 minutes long. It certainly intrigued three young children in a family walking along the side of the Old Quad on their way to the Talbot Rice Gallery. I can at the end of the festival reveal that you could listen to the music in the Old Quad for free when walking along the side and certainly those three young children enjoyed the Mozart.
The second work was Dvořák’s String Quartet No 13 in G major Op 106. This was a very different work from the Mozart, much later of course, written in 1895 when he returned from three years in America where he wrote his much better known ‘American Quartet’. I am a great fan of the ‘American Quartet’, not least because I was a visiting professor at the University of Iowa in 1983 and was driving through rural Iowa and in a little town called Spillville Iowa I switched on the radio and on NPR they were playing the ‘American Quartet’, which I discovered was written among the Czech community in Spillville when Dvořák was spending the summer. The No 13 sometimes known as ‘the Bohemian’ celebrated his joy at returning to his native Bohemia after three years in New York. It is a much more substantial work than the Mozart and at 45 minutes much longer. Indeed when it finished well after 1pm I rushed to the loo thinking they would never play an encore - but they did, a short cheery piece which no one seemed to recognise and since I was in the loo I can’t describe! However the Dvořák was wonderful – big, expansive, at times it sounded like a symphony and gave all the quartet members a chance to shine. I can see I will have to reassess my preference for the ‘American Quartet’ as long as I have 45 minutes to spare. The big audience gave the Gringolts a very warm reception; they will be back in the future, hopefully in the Queens Hall or maybe in our new chamber music hall next to the St James centre which now seems to be going ahead. The Festival are to be congratulated on mounting their “big tent festival” but I for one will be happy to be back inside the concert hall. You can listen to the Gringolts on Radio 3 without the usual background noises of the Old Quad via BBC Sounds. You might even find a picture of Donald Macleod introducing it in his snazzy yellow trousers!
