REVIEW: Elias convey two different mournings
THEY ARE now such familiar faces. So when Old Market artistic director Caroline Brown told the audience: "They're so talented – and it's wonderful to be seeing them at the start of their careers", it was a pleasing prompt that the young Elias are only in the January of their time together as a string quartet.
Their life expectancy, given greatness and personal and artistic harmony, could be 40 years.
The French sisters Sara and Marie Bitlloch, plus the males on the inner parts, Scottish violinist Donald Grant and inscrutable Swedish violist Martin Saving, are also part of other regular Coffee Concerters, Ensemble 360. That name defines "music in the round", which is brought to now capacity audiences each winter season at the Old Market, and in which the Elias, formed an music school in Manchester, specialise at their Sheffield base.
Sara, in a glinting gypsy headscarf, was cast twice in the ceaselessly vigorous role demanded of first violins by Mendelssohn's chamber music. And she broke vocal silence when she extensively introduced the final work before they played it.
Marie, in a plum, loose-sleeved top, was as ever physically responsive and exercising a subtle drawstring around the others with her eyes.
Meanwhile, the lads, while separate in open-necked black shirts for the early morning, were indivisibly integral to the whole, and hard at labour in Mendelssohn's engine room.
With a work in the middle by Georgy Kurtag, his memorial Officium Breve in Memory of Andreae Szervansky, the Elias' presentation had a dark sky.
Framed by Mendelssohn's centre-life Opus 44 in E minor and his late Opus 80 in F minor, so shaped by his shock at losing his soul-mate sister Fanny – both died young, after strokes, in 1847, he at 38 - the Kurtag faces grief and loss and tells of common defeat by the challenge.
The now 82-year-old Romanian-born Hungarian is a noted piano coach. His past pupils include the internationally celebrated Zoltan Kocsis and Andras Schiff.
His compositional route has come past Messaien and Milhaud, Stockhausen and Ligeti, and in this piece, as well as quoting Hungarian composer Szervansky's Serenade for Strings, he adopts the style of, and further quotes, Webern.
This brings an attitude that musical sentences do not have to be completed. Or they can act as drastic prcis of larger ideas which may not need relating in full.
So even the word "economy" does not describe Kurtag's need to break off a statement and this produces a response to grief in which the sayable can be left unsaid, and thoughts and emotions require no complete utterance.
Suggestions of shock, of the unthinkable, the unresolvable, the unfulfillable, are all intensely conveyed. And although this work is cast as a Roman Catholic service of memorium, Kurtag is saying, perhaps, that were he to present us with an orthodox Requiem it might merely paper over the vast cracks and make routinely uniform the unanswered questions of mourning.
So here was a work whose impact on the audience would inevitably vary, even polarise, and it appealed to certain temperaments undemanding of consolation in such circumstances, as well as proving deeply movingly for other listeners in echoing a fellow inability to articulate completely the ongoing experience of grieving.
The music thus made progress forever falteringly. There are many miniscule and deliberately incomplete movement sections, until finally it finds a flow, possibly a letting out, in which, first a soothing three-four time section of much more sustained length finds its way into one of four beats to the bar.
And Kurtag, if not already successfully avoiding the obvious and the conventional, finishes the work in stabbing, even aggressive doubt. And this doubt appears to seek some song of consolation for which the mind is unready. The music has no hope yet, if at all, of finding any "paradisum". It breaks off, not even half-articulated, but abruptly, and without finality. A struggle to cope in inescapably conveyed.
This work is less than 30 years old. Mendelssohn 161 years ago wrote his F minor quartet having already mastered oratorio (for example Elijah) and acknowledged church liturgy (his Reformation Symphony) in an idiom which, out of duty, provided its Victorian and subsequent audiences with a sense of resolution.
His sure grasp of musical form, and the strength and depth of the music he produced here after Fanny's death, resulted in a masterpiece of his own art that some might say at last came close to the perfection of the astonishing, and by him unequalled Octet of his youth at 16.
And yet somehow, despite composing a piece in four fine movements with their own sense of completeness, Mendelssohn fails convincingly to tie up the ends. For all his typical and customary momentum, pace, conviction, and ease of expression, did the exercise defeat him? Did the confrontation destroy him? Although life had to go on, he never reached the year's end.
The Elias' achievement this morning was in conveying the intentions of Kurtag and Mendelssohn's F minor quartet on the same bill. Could any quartet have done it better? Probably not.
Next Coffee Concert – January 11 (11am) by Sacconi Quartet (Ben Hancox and Hannah Dawson violins, Robin Ashwell viola, Cara Berridge cello):
Haydn early Opus 9 No 2 in Eb;
British composer Robin Holloway No 2 (2004, in five movements, premiered this year by this ensemble);
Beethoven late Opus 131 in C sharp.
Box office: 01273 736222.
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Tuesday 14 February 2012
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