Glasgow String Quartet

Cottier Theatre, Glasgow

Michael Tumelty

*****

THERE was a cloud hanging over the writing-up of Monday’s Cottier concert, at the end of which I heard of the death of conductor Walter Weller, who would have known and worked with the four musicians in the Glasgow String Quartet. All are seasoned members of the RSNO, and many of its musicians would have held the revered maestro in great respect.

But what a stonker of a concert violinists William Chandler and Jacqueline Spiers, violist Ian Budd and cellist Betsy Taylor turned out for the Cottier Chamber Project. It included a wonderfully characterful performance of Sally Beamish’s Opus California, a quartet that had my head reeling with its needle-sharp evocations of Californian scenes; the second movement “snapshot” of the Golden Gate Bridge from the air was dizzying.

As good as that was, the group’s performance of Shostakovich’s Ninth String Quartet, in the Cottier’s ongoing cycle of the Russian master’s quartets, was awesome. Despite the beginnings of some sort of liberalism in the Kruschev era, it was still a long way before 1990 and the end of a system – and the beginning of what?

Shostakovich still had much complex personal ground to cover, and in the 1964 quartet I think he was still treading warily and obliquely in the huge piece.

The Glasgow String Quartet’s edge-of-the-seat performance hit me as having struck an acutely perceptive balance in the music: strutting away jauntily one moment, then abruptly turning in on itself, muttering conspiratorially in guarded motifs, those things that were still too risky to say aloud.

This was gripping, real-life musicmaking, on a sad night.