Music review: Australian String Quartet’s Convergence
Playing superlatively in its 40th anniversary Convergence concert, the Australian String Quartet again showed why they are such a uniquely wonderful group.
With 40 years behind them, the ASQ has recently been staging a series of celebrations, of which this Convergence concert tour with music by Paul Stanhope, Britten and Schubert was the culmination. It was not so much about looking back upon their history or gloating about past achievements. Rather, it was a steady-as-she-goes kind of program that saw newer works converging with old in time-honoured fashion.
We know from their recent Rapture concert how well the ASQ have been playing of late, and this time they were just as compelling – and that’s despite having slotted in a hectic overseas trip last month. The four players have been perfecting a style that is both tautly controlled and expressively wide. These days they play at an exceptionally high technical level, but one can admire them even more greatly for their deep enquiry into the music.
Such was the case with these composers, each of whom ventures well beyond ‘accepted practice’ into the dangerously unknown. With Sydney composer Paul Stanhope, who has composed three quartets, he seems to confront all the extremes of the modern world in his first one, subtitled ‘Elegies & Dances’.
Immediately, we are thrown into some undisclosed dark space marked out by slow, hymn-like harmonies and a throbbing cello that moves in threatening semitonal intervals. Crazily, the first violin escapes on a skittishly errant course of its own, and a chaotic scrimmage ensues between all four players.
This String Quartet No. 1 from 2008 (revised in 2012) really does hold the mirror up to a fractured world in a series of sometimes amusingly playful but seriously questioning episodes. Ultimately, it tells the truth in exasperated sighing motifs in the violin at the end. Stanhope, whose song cycle nyilamum the ASQ performed with Lou Bennett at the last Adelaide Festival, greatly impresses in the lucidity of his writing: the content and meaning of his music all roll together in one intelligible flow. It was made all the more convincing by the ASQ’s intense, committed account, which could not have been finer.
Benjamin Britten does broadly similar things in his String Quartet No. 2 from 63 years earlier. Although his methods are starker and less experimental, he also repeatedly places the first violin outside the rest of the ensemble to create internal knots of tension. Mystery pervades this quartet, from the strange modal outlines of its opening melody to the titanic struggles that erupt in its neo-Purcellian chaconne. Few modern works possess such an aloof, sinister form of beauty.
The ASQ again found the precise artistic centre of this music. They resolved its eloquence and myriad textures in razor sharp detail. One thing this group does particularly well is handle dynamics with minutest control. This was evident in the chaconne as its theme was passed around between instruments. Contrasts were striking too, between sweetest lyricism in the first violin and gutsy playing in the second violin, and between vigorous solo playing in the cello and immaculately controlled waves of energy as this work powers home towards its ending. About as savage as chamber music gets, that ending, consisting of 21 swiping C major chords, left one’s ears ringing.
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For psychological insight, though, it all comes back to Schubert. His String Quartet No. 14, ‘Death and the Maiden’, is all about how the singing line is intensified through multiple layers of meaning. The Alban Berg Quartett used to give this work huge stridency, and so many other groups of today make this work verge almost on the symphonic. Branching out on their own, there was much to admire in the ASQ’s highly finessed approach. It had vocality – meaning that there was not such a sudden jolt when we come to its famous, song-based, second movement.
Literally a dialogue between two personages, the Maiden in Schubert’s original song (‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’, D 531) is tormented by Death and tries to repel his advances. “Do not touch me”, she cries. The whole encounter becomes a metaphor for Schubert’s own vulnerability in the tragic circumstances of his final destitute, ailing months. Dale Barltrop, the ASQ’s wonderful first violinist, invested the divinest grace and sweetness in its melody, against hushed, immaculately tuned chords from his colleagues. One had to hold one’s breath.
Over its four decades of history, a total of 24 musicians have counted themselves as members of the ASQ. That number seems extraordinarily high for a quartet, but the fact remains that its unusual organisational structure is one of the reasons for its longevity. Let’s celebrate that, for sure, but even more the group’s superlative playing in its current line-up– especially in this concert.
The Australian String Quartet performed Convergence at Elder Hall on 17 October, before touring nationally