Con Brio concert features exceptional string quartets
TONIGHT, Thursday, Con Brio present one of the UK’s foremost chamber music ensembles, the critically acclaimed London based Piatti Quartet.
The Quartet spent two years as Leverhulme Fellows at the Royal Academy of Music and are laureates of the St Martin in the Fields Competition, a Martin Musical Fund-Philharmonia Scholarship, multiple Hattori Foundation awards, and the St Peter’s Prize. At the 2015 Wigmore Hall International (formerly the London International) String Quartet Competition, they won joint 2nd prize as well as the Sidney Griller Award for the best performance of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s ‘Contusion’. They became Resident Quartet at London’s King’s Place from the start of the 2023-24 season.
They have produced a string of critically-acclaimed recordings and collaborated with many of the most recognizable names in classical music such as Nicky Spence, Julius Drake, Michael Collins, Barry Douglas, Janina Fialkowska, Melvyn Tan, Ian Bostridge and the Belcea Quartet. Accolades in 2023 include Gramophone’s ‘Editor’s Choice for the Month’ with NMC, a five star review from BBC Music Magazine with Delphian and in 2022 they were nominated for ‘Recording of the Year’ with both Limelight and Gramophone for their collaborative disc on the Hyperion label.
The programme for this concert opens with Felix Mendelssohn’s String Quartet No. 1 in E flat, Op. 12. Mendelssohn wrote this quartet during the first of many visits to Britain, dating it ‘September 14, 1829, London’.
The tour included a summertime visit to Scotland and Wales, the former providing the inspiration for his Hebrides overture and the Scottish symphony.
However the romanticism of the setting was not reflected in the quartet.
The 20-year-old composer turned away from the more extravagant ideals of romanticism and continued his deep reflection upon the string quartets of Beethoven.
The quartet Op. 12 reflects the closeness of Beethoven's later quartets, which had just been published a year or so earlier.
The slow introduction of the first movement recalls the opening of the ‘Harp’ Quartet, op. 74.
Its grave but beautifully balanced beginning soon gives way to a serene, song-like first theme, and the rest of a classic sonata form ensues.
The Mendelssohn quartet is followed by two more contemporary pieces, Ernest Moeran’s String Quartet No. 2 in E flat and a piece commissioned by the Piatti Quartet and the Three Choirs Festival in 2022 from Charlotte Harding entitled Iorsa.
Ernest Moeran (1894-1950) learned to play the violin and piano as a child.
He subsequently enrolled at the Royal College of Music and studied composition with Charles Villiers Stanford and after he returned from World War I he continued his studies at the Royal College under John Ireland.
It was from Ireland that Moeran came to be heavily influenced by English folk-song and thus belongs to the lyrical tradition.
The influence of the nature and landscapes of Norfolk and Ireland are also often evident in his music.
His E flat quartet was found among his papers after his premature death. It was thought that the work was an early composition, but this is not borne out by the music, and it is now thought that the sectional second movement dates from the post war 1940s as there is a distinct feeling of the folksongs, he collected in County Kerry and published in 1948.
The concert concludes with arguably the best-loved quartet ever written, Antonin Dvo ák’s String Quartet No. 12 in F major, Op. 96, known as the American Quartet.
While Professor of Composition at the Prague Conservatory Dvo ák was invited to become director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York in 1892.
During his sojourn in New York he found himself uneasy with American high society and consequently retreated to the predominately Czech town of Spilville in Iowa for his summer vacations.
Here he was exposed to and became fascinated by African American and Native American music.
These influences – minor pentatonic scales, syncopated rhythms and blues phrasing – can be heard throughout the ‘American’ quartet, mixing in with the composer’s usual quartet method.
Indeed, in the second Lento movement a single theme of four bars appears like a refrain, a Bohemian blues, whose numerous possibilities for repetition and expression form an irresistible hymn with a curious rocking rhythm.
The charming finale, one of Dvorak’s most enchanting movements, is exuberant and full of vital optimism.
It has been said that no work in the string quartet repertoire expresses so much contentment and joy as does the American.
This concert takes place in The Methodist Church, Wine Street and tickets at €20, students €10, can be bought from The Model at 071 9141405 or on www.themodel.ie.