Lammermuir Festival: Quatuor Agate I
Gladsmuir Parish Church - 17/09/22
Gladsmuir’s lovely 19th-Century Parish Church on the morning of 17th September saw the first of two concerts by the young French quartet Quatuor Agate at the Lammermuir Festival. In his prefatory remarks before the performance, Artistic Co-Director of the Lammermuir Festival James Waters drew attention to the church’s fine organ (promising to feature it in future Festival programming) and the building’s acoustic, purportedly ideal for string quartets. I can wholeheartedly concur, and the contrast with some other venues of the Festival was as pleasing as it was welcome.
The programme consisted of three works: Haydn’s Op.20 No.2 in C, Webern’s Langsamer Satz and, after an interval, Brahms’ No.1 in C minor.
The second of Haydn’s less frequently performed Op.20 set was, to my surprise, completely unknown to me and on this first hearing I must say it has been unjustly neglected. The cellist of the Quartet, Simon Iachemet, genially introduced the programme and, when the playing started with first violin tacet, also the first theme of the quartet. In the Op.20 set, Haydn pushed the envelope of the genre that he had essentially developed, with greater equality and individual character in all four parts, exploring new effects such as close-harmony parallel writing for the two violins, freeing the cello from pedal notes to cantabile theme handling and agile arpeggiation, and freeing the inner parts from chordal support to conversational interplay. The playing was quite magical with flawless intonation, rich tone, perfect bow control and subtle use of tenuto to point the phrasing. The ensemble sound was warm and perfectly blended yet permitting individual character of the voices where the music demanded it. The slow movement was no less surprising: a darkly tragic operatic scene, complete with recitative and arioso episodes considerably, I dare add, more dramatic than anything that might reward an exploration of the composer’s largely forgettable operas. The tension is relieved by the brief elegant minuet and trio, with what must surely be the first occurrence of the Haydnesque chordal effect usually termed ‘mimicry of Croatian bagpipes’. The finale is a monumental quadruple fugue of fiendish contrapuntal complexity, initially piano but very soon erupting into a quasi-choral polyphony. What a fabulous piece and what a superb performance of it!
Webern’s Langsamer Satz predates his avant-garde austerely concise atonal works and is thoroughly Late Romantic in its sound world and unashamedly descriptive in the unfolding thematic development. It remained unpublished and unperformed until 17 years after his death. It is descriptive of his innermost feelings while on an idyllic walking holiday in Austrian woodland with his beloved. The writing alternates between autumnal and radiant, inner calm and urgency, climax and afterglow. It is very moving and quite different from the music for which Webern became famous. It received a cogent, skilful and magical interpretation and performance.
Brahms’ First Quartet, like his First Symphony, had an extremely long gestation period, with numerous aborted attempts due to his feelings of unworthiness of the legacy of Beethoven (and of course the esteem of Clara Schumann). The work is in a tragic vein with the atmosphere of a Gothic novel, especially in the outer movements, and a unity derived from recurrence of thematic material. It received a dramatic, revelatory performance. The first movement had a great sense of driven dark passion, whilst still allowing the phrasing to breathe. The Romanze, opening in the major key, rapidly descends into harmonic ambiguity. The chording in the piano passages was delicious and I didn’t want it to end. The tone and phrasing were equally fabulous. The Allegretto third movement has an uneasy dark minor-key ruefulness, giving way to a warm radiant cantabile central Animato over tripping pizzicato and expert bariolage on the second violin. Back into tempestuous Gothic novel territory for the Allegro finale, with a brief C-major interlude followed by lovely scrunchy harmonies descending from the glow. After a perfectly judged pause, back out into the storm for the ineluctable drive to the conclusion. A compelling and memorable performance and, for me, a highlight of the Festival.