Roxburgh String Quartet entertain at Kilmory
THE COUNCIL chamber at Kilmory once again resonated to sounds of exquisite music on Saturday evening, thanks to the Roxburgh String Quartet.
The classical musicians performed works spanning more than 130 years of musical history, while the audience experienced emotions from the happiness of childhood to deep tragedy and loss.
Visiting Mid Argyll in their 10th anniversary year, the Roxburgh Quartet have always nurtured their Scottish roots as they continue to bring the highest quality music to the area with their unaffected brilliance and secure musicianship.
The quartet began their programme with Beethoven’s F major,
op. 18 no. 1: a work marking this great composer’s early ventures in writing for string quartet. Completed around 1798, it was revised to its present form in 1801 with a warning from the composer not to use the previous score, saying: ‘I have greatly changed it, having just learned how to write quartets properly.’
In four movements, all the drama, humour, excitement and compositional adventures to be expected from a Beethoven work were revealed to the audience through the insightful playing of the Roxburgh team. As expected, they showed impressive ensemble as the audience were delighted with a well balanced and virtuosic performance.
Shostakovich fol-
lowed, with his first String quartet in C
major, written in just six weeks in the summer of 1938. In this work, the composer evokes his childhood. It is light-hearted with a touch of playful and mischievous drama, and what may well be a game of hide and seek played out in the third movement.
The mood darkened in the second half of the concert. Courageously, the Roxburgh chose to play Mendelssohn’s last quartet, a work written following the tragic death of sister Fanny, his life companion and muse. Mendelssohn’s deep anger and sense of injustice burns powerfully throughout this piece. The players were masters of the technical challenges set and achieved a good balancing of the first two movements, both of which are intensely fiery and virtuosic, giving little relief from his tirade, through neither change of tempo or pace. The pathos of the third movement was deeply felt by the players with the sense of hurt and anger returning undiluted in Mendelssohn’s all-consuming Finale; a work in such great contrast to the composer’s familiar output.
The Roxburgh Quartet, after long applause, delighted the audience by playing an arrangement by Stammitz of the well-known Scottish air, The Dark Island, as their encore. Their Argyll tour continued at Lorne and Lowland Church Hall in Campbeltown on Friday February 10, then St John’s Cathedral, Oban, on Sunday February 12, and is next at Hanover Street Church Hall, Dunoon, this Sunday, February 19, at 3pm.