Barltrop enjoys life in Oz

> BY ALEXANDER VARTY

Leaving Vancouver was hard, Dale Barltrop admits, but in the end his decision to accept the first-violin chair with the Australian String Quartet made itself.

“It was really a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be in a professional, salaried string quartet that is the only such group in Australia,” the Brisbaneborn former Vancouver Symphony Orchestra concertmaster explains, checking in from the University of Maryland, where the ASQ is launching a North American tour. “And to be able to combine that with my concertmaster position with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, which I had been doing for a few years in conjunction with my job in Vancouver, was an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up.

“I’m at a point in my life where I really wanted to extend myself,” Barltrop continues. “I wanted to do something that I hadn’t done before, which is to be in a string quartet. For many string players, that is the ultimate repertoire—not that it’s better or worse than the symphonic repertoire, but for me it was the Pandora’s box that I wanted to open.”

He laughs, but in the background of his decision was another possible pack of problems. The Australian String Quartet had come close to dissolution in 2014, in the wake of an ugly and well-publicized internal dispute that led Australia’s classicalmusic-and-arts magazine, Limelight, to describe the Adelaide-based ensemble as “historically unstable”.

This was information that Barltrop considered, but soon discarded.

“It’s no secret in Australia that the ASQ has had trouble retaining its members over the last, I would say, five years,” he admits. “There was a period where they were very stable for about seven years; prior to that, they had quite a few personnel changes as well. But one of the things that gave me confidence joining this particular combination was my prior relationship with all of the other members of the quartet, particularly the violist, Stephen King.…we have a long history, and I very much respect and admire the other two players, the second violinist and cellist, who are wonderful people.

“We’re now 20 months into our new formation,” he adds, “and it feels like we have the right chemistry to make a go of it.”

King is the only member remaining from the pre-controversy era, but one thing that hasn’t changed with the ASQ is its mandate: to promote Australian music and contemporary composition while honouring the classical tradition. The group’s certainly going to do that during its Vancouver visit; having played an excerpt of the late Peter Sculthorpe’s String Quartet No. 11: Jabiru Dreaming at a Music on Main concert on September 19, it will join Barltrop’s former employer for three shows at the Orpheum, where the large and the small ensembles combine to play music by John Adams and Edward Elgar.

Adams’s Absolute Jest— a bold choice for the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s season-opening concerts—should prove a particular test of the ASQ’S resolve.

“It’ll be quite an adventure,” Barltrop admits. “But it’s a brilliantly crafted work, and very much a reimagining, a reworking of some Beethoven’s themes from his late string quartets.…and it’s certainly not, as the title might suggest, bastardizing or making fun of Beethoven. In fact, John Adams actually talks about the jest of the title in terms of its Latin meaning, which is ‘exploit’, or ‘deed’. So he talks about it being an exercising of one’s wit by means of the imagination. It’s a very clever work—and presents some challenges, because the combination of a string quartet and a symphony orchestra is almost unprecedented.

“Of course, we also have Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro, which we’re performing in the Lang Lang concert with the VSO,” he continues. “But in that work, the quartet is more a part of the larger string group. In the Adams, it’s very much a separate entity, so much so that he calls for light amplification of the string quartet, so that it can be heard above the full forces of the symphony. We’ll have our work cut out for us—but I think it’ll be a great way to kick off [VSO music director] Bramwell Tovey’s final season.”