Reviewed by Ewart Shaw, Monday 23rd August 2021.
The Firm, that enterprising bunch of local composers, have made a late start to their 2021 season of chamber music in the Elder Hall with
String Quartets, New and Old. Of the 127 concerts that they have presented over the years, this is the first that has had be cancelled and rescheduled. It was well worth the wait.
The quartet was brought together especially for this event, and the rescheduling required the replacement of violinist, Belinda McFarlane, with Belinda Gehlert, who took her place alongside Helen Ayres, violin, Martin Alexander, viola, and Sharon Grigoryan, 'cello.
Haydn, they say, taught Mozart how to write a string quartet. Mozart, they add, taught Haydn how a string quartet should be written. From that day to this, the string quartet, of two violins, viola, and 'cello, has provided composers with the opportunity to create great music, and audiences to enjoy the form for its emotional depth and breadth of expression.
Indeed, Musica Viva, one of the world's most enterprising concert giving organizations, sprang from the desire of European migrants post-war to enjoy the musical lives that they had been forced to leave behind in Germany and Austria.
There were three works by local composers on the program, two of them from British women, and three more by masters of the form. Ayanna Witter-Johnson and Hannah Kendall are both black women and take very different approaches to what is, after all, quite an imperialist art form, even if that empire is the Austro-Hungarian.
Witter-Johnson blends the sounds of bento, a Jamaican folk style, with the instruments of the quartet, loosening the relationship between the instruments, and giving 'cellist, Sharon Grigoryan, the chance to show off her percussion skills, beating out the rhythms on her instrument.
Hannah Kendall is much more politically direct. Her work is entitled
Glances/I Don't Belong Here. The seven miniatures are inspired by what she calls her "most cherished non-urban settings". They are also inspired by British-Guyanese artist Ingrid Pollard's series of photos of black British subjects in the Lake District. That sense that black people are not indigenous to the English countryside, not comfortable there, not welcome there, is one of the factors that has over the last few years made it the mission of the National Trust to encourage Britain's urban black population to travel to the countryside of the green and pleasant land.
The program then returned to the classic tradition of the quartet with
Stelae for String Quartet, by Raymond Chapman-Smith, one of the founders of The Firm. It's a memorial piece for W. G. Sebald, a German born writer whose early death put paid to a career many believed would lead inevitably to the Nobel prize. Inspired by a poem by Paul Celan, it is rich in the sonorities of the Viennese tradition.
Then the recital moved up. The
Langsamer Satz of Anton Webern from 1905 predates his influential exploration of tonality that made him one of the most influential composers of the early part of the twentieth century. It's essentially the slow movement of a quartet, the rest of which was not composed. It's sombre and full of longing, inspired in part by a hiking holiday with his fiancée in the mountains. It is so beautiful, and was played with such tenderness, that it rather outshone everything else on the program.
Two more pieces from established composers followed it. The intermezzo movement, from
Arnold Schoenberg's third string quartet, is a skittish, rhythmically unsteady work, much more reminiscent of the developments in chamber music of the early twentieth century. Schoenberg claimed his string quartet writing was heavily influenced by Mozart. I'll take his word for it.
Two bars into the next work, and you know it's
Philip Glass. His fingerprints are all over it, and the players maintained its impetus throughout with perfect balance. It is essentially an epitome of Glass's style and it will recall for you everything he's written. There's a bar or two that sound like Mendelssohn with the deep surge of the Hebrides Overture.
The concert began and ended with the lights lowered. Luke Altmann's
Irenabyss is a Firm commission, infused with lyric inspiration, and the final piece,
Penumbra, by Belinda Gehlert, was a joy to hear, and I'd love to hear both these pieces, indeed, the whole concert, again.
This quartet has come together especially to present this concert and it would be a really fine addition to the chamber music resources of Adelaide. Every string quartet needs a name and might I have the temerity to suggest the Hendrickson Quartet, a tribute to Lyndall Hendrickson. She was a South Australian violinist, a child prodigy, whose international career was terminated by polio. She became an acclaimed teacher, and researcher into neurodiversity. She was a dear friend, and she lived to be 100.
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