The Lotus String Quartet from Japan gave the first performance of Kevin O'Connell's grandly designed String Quartet 2001, matching the intensity of its thought with the intensity of their playing. And what a sound they produced - full-blooded, confident, and with an excitement such as Adams must have experienced at his first prospect of the "verdurous walls of Paradise"! The audience was within the sound, not listening from outside.
String Quartet in G, Op 18 No 2.........................................Beethoven
Six Bagatelles, Op 9................................................................Webern
Landscape...........................................................................Takemitsu
String Quartet 2001..................................................Kevin O'Connell
So Beethoven's Op 18 No 2 was played with an ardour that transcended the limitations of the genre; there was no sense of easy familiarity, rather an urgent and necessary confrontation that demanded the alert attention of players and listeners alike. It showed a concurrent awareness of glittering surfaces and subterranean forces. In like fashion, Webern's Six Bagatelles, despite their brevity and lean asceticism, assumed that romantic warmth at which the composer aimed but which performers have difficulty obtaining.
Takemitsu's Landscape is, as the title might indicate, a static piece, but far removed from any pastoral sentiment. Nothing much seems to happen, the mood is not ominous, but the component parts are held together by the tensions that undulate through the structure.
Kevin O'Connell spoke of his trepidation at stepping into the circle, ringed by fire, of the writers of quartets. He has emerged with a prize, a work of lavish dimensions and richly integrated ideas. It fulfils Hugh MacDiarmid's requirements for a poem: "Unremitting, relentless, organised to the last degree." It is almost a final statement on the string quartet and should become an indispensable part of the repertoire. The playing of the Lotus Quartet was magnificent.
