We were really spoiled this week as on Thursday we had the Belcea Quartet performing at the Brussels Conservatorium. Personally I feel this is one of the finest chamber ensembles around. They didn't disappoint in this choice Viennese programme. The Conservatoire was packed but as is customary this was a very disciplined audience that seems to know why it is spending time in a concert hall. The rapt concentration and the relatively small hall created an ambience of wonderful intimacy. The Haydn quartet (which I hadn't heard before) came off very well. What struck me was the relaxed, almost friendly energy that radiates from the group. The music seemed to emerge almost effortlessly. It sounded like the image that is projected by a Zeiss lens: there was wonderfully luminous microdetail, clearly etched but soft contours and a holographic sense of musical lines meshing with one another. It's not spectacular but musically deeply satisfying. Corina Belcea leads as a genuine 'primus inter pares' (and a ravishing appearance she is too). Her violin soars but not to put her colleagues in the shadow but to stretch a broader canvas for them. This is quartet playing as it should be.
The Beethoven quartet came off slightly less successfully I thought. I have the more assertive (maybe even aggressive) rendition of the Artemis Quartet in my ears and for this 'angry' Beethoven piece this is perhaps more appropriate than the somewhat softer grained approach of the Belcea. Anyway, we were listening to what is still a very good performance.
After the break came the Schubert String Quintet in C, with Valentin Erben (ex-Alban Berg) taking the second cello part (as he did on the Belcea's 2009 recording of this piece). Again, I didn't know the Schubert so I had to listen with unprepared ears. Schubert is a composer I still have to discover. Certainly, I have an inkling of what Schubert stands for and it is not an idiom that I am immediately attracted to. There is a simplicity at the heart of Schubert's music, it seems to me, that attracts and leaves me cold at the same time. I love an architectural conception of music. Music that is 'durchkomponiert'. That's why I like Bartok. That's why I am intrigued but also suspicious of Debussy who made it look like his music was not 'composed' at all whilst lavishing the greatest care on the most minute detail of its architectural conception. Schubert throws a single chord at you and immediately one is taken off guard by a complex emotional vista. The Quintet is no exception. It's a very late piece, in fact the last chamber composition Schubert was able to finish two months before his untimely death. It has an otherworldly atmosphere similar to the late piano sonatas. As in those sonatas, Schubert takes the time to develop his musical material: the work takes over 50 minutes! The work didn't strike me as difficult, however. There's a lot of repetition so it's easy to follow (compared to the Beethoven Serioso where there is no repetition at all). The cumulative impact of this long piece, however, is quite extraordinary. One really has the experience of a journey to the edge. It is often said that the quintet's finale, with it's earthbound, schmaltzy character, doesn't seem to belong. It most certainly does belong and the merrymaking is all the more poignant given the seriousness of what went before. Yves Knockaert thought in his spoken introduction before the concert that Schubert grasped back to Haydn in this finale. But I don't hear Haydn; I hear Mahler there, and certainly Bruckner, and in the final bars we are getting a glimpse of the territory that Mahler reconnoitered in this valedictory symphony and that was further explored by the Second Viennese School. In that sense the Belcea's reading was certainly revelatory. I was so impressed by their maturity and humanity. This is true, timeless artistry.
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten