An evening of jaw-dropping virtuosity
We’re in a golden age for young string quartets. Hardly a month goes by without another brilliant debut that leaves critics scrabbling for new superlatives. Even so, the Schumann Quartet is something special. This group, consisting of three brothers of German/ Japanese parentage together with an Estonian-born violist, on Wednesday night played a sensational all-haydn concert at the Wigmore Hall.
There was hardly a bar that didn’t display a jaw-dropping virtuosity. Even a simple major chord seemed special, filling the hall with an almost supernaturally radiant and powerful sound. As for the numerous passages of rapid-fire conversational give-andtake, they were infallibly precise. But some might ask: do we really want “sensational” performances of a composer who more than any other exalts the sane middle ground of life? Rumbustious wit, robust good humour and a devoutly chaste lyricism are the qualities that make Haydn treasurable. In order to speak to us, they don’t need to be exaggerated or buffed to a high sheen.
That reservation crept over me a few times. The first movement of the Quartet Op 33 in G major was typical of the evening in its ostentatious brilliance. It zipped along at a giddy pace, the accented notes flung off with perfectly drilled precision. But the tempo was so fast that the shape of the lines was hard to discern. Haydn had one of the quickest minds of any composer who ever lived, which is why performers sometimes need to let the music breathe a little, giving it time to register, rather than pressing down hard on the accelerator.
Fortunately, there were many more moments when real musicality was discernible through the brilliance. Two of the four quartets featured those hymnlike slow movements that were Haydn’s trademark, and these shone with a truly rapt, innocent glow. In the gravely beautiful Quartet Op 42, the players showed they’d grasped that mysterious aloof quality of Haydn, which can sometimes take on a paradoxical quality of being deeply moving – as it did here, thanks to the strangely lost, lonely tone summoned by Erik Schumann, the leader.
Finally, in Haydn’s last completed quartet, they made the witty offbeat jokes seem even wittier when the music came round for a second time, pausing for an extra millisecond just to make sure we were thoroughly wrong-footed. From such tiny details are great performances made.