Various Venues
The festival has fallen in love with the French string quartet, Quatuor Ebène. And if you wanted to know why, all you would have needed was just a few minutes from the start of their concert at Castletown House on Saturday.
The Ebènes opened their programme with Mozart’s Quartet in D minor, K421, of 1783, one of the six quartets the composer dedicated to Haydn.
They took a spacious approach, setting a tempo at which every smallest gesture could tell, but yet not ever getting lost in the detail. It was almost as if they had a magical musical lens to emulate the tricks of photography so that the normal distinctions of foreground and background were eliminated in a gorgeously full embrace that put everything within immediate aural reach.
They closed their programme with late Beethoven, a time-stilling performance of the Quartet in C sharp minor, Op. 131, that seemed to leave the audience holding its collective breath. Much of Beethoven’s work in the 1820s was a puzzle not only to his contemporaries, but also to musicians and music-lovers for many decades thereafter. The Ebènes’ balanced approach didn’t so much provide clear solutions as preserve the music’s sense of unfathomable mystery.
Sandwiched, a little incongruously, between Mozart and Beethoven was Borodin’s tuneful Second Quartet, which, surprisingly, the Ebènes tugged and teased at a little too much, as if they somehow didn’t trust the composer’s fund of unending melody to work without an overlay of outside assistance.
The Ebènes were not the only first-rate string quartet to feature during the week.
The Pavel Haas Quartet from the Czech Republic, playing in the dryish intimacy of the Freemasons’ Hall in Molesworth Street, sounded altogether lighter and leaner in attractively straight-talking performances of Beethoven (the Quartet in F, Op. 59 No. 1) and Schubert (the String Quintet, with Danjulo Ishizaka playing the second cello part).
Killruddery House was the venue for Monday’s programme of piano trios from Michael d’Arcy (violin), Hannah Roberts (cello) and Lance Coburn (piano). They juxtaposed Beethoven (his Op. 1 No. 1 in E flat) and Schubert (the self-standing Notturno) with Smetana’s elegiac Trio in G minor, “written in memory of my first child, Bedriska, who enchanted us with her extraordinary musical talent, and yet was snatched away from us by death, aged four-and-a-half years”.
The playing was not ideally focused, the finale of the Beethoven almost falling over itself under the force of an over-driven energy, and the Smetana sounding too overwrought to hang together. Playing and music sounded in best balance in the sometimes elaborate embellishments of the Schubert.
The “Great Houses” of the festival’s name continue to be interpreted with unusual freedom, so Friday’s festival debut of the Vivaldi specialists of Adrian Chandler’s ensemble, La Serenissima, took place in Dublin’s Christ Church Cathedral.
The highlight of an evening of sparky and lively music-making which included the
Four Seasons
was Peter Whelan’s wonderfully agile handling of the almost cartoonishly vivacious Bassoon Concerto in C, RV473, a tour-de-force of wind playing if ever there was one.
