String Quartet in A, Op.55, No.1 - Haydn

Amazing Face - Deirdre Gribbin

String Quartet No.3 - Schnittke

Grosse Fuge, Op.113 - Beethoven

In an usually stimulating programme, ranging from the gentleness of Haydn's Op.55 No.1 to the organised violence of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, the Vanbrugh String Quartet projected all the music with compelling immediacy. Deirdre Gribbin's Amazing Face showed the players in the peak of their form. Most remarkable was the second movement, made of the finest threads of sound, which are on the very edge of the audible. Such sounds might be heard if one were losing one's hearing and straining to distinguish between music and silence. The sudden burst of sound that opens the third movement restored one's faith in one's faculties. The composer's own words deserve quotation: "The fractured sound of ebbing and flowing string sonorities often reveal languid expressive melodies. The music hides characters." If the music hides characters it is because of its iridescent, continually mobile surface. The fourth movement begins with a wild fugato-like section where each part seems to be claiming independence. It was here that a string broke, an accident that could not have been more effective if it had been rehearsed. Throughout the treatment of the quartet medium was both exploratory and assured.

Schnittke's quotations from Lassus, Beethoven and Shostakovich do little more than provide material for his own complicated balancing of lines. Unsignposted, they might well be overlooked in the maelstrom of sound. The Vanbrugh safely navigated the treacherous waters and then concluded Sunday's recital in the John Field Room with Beethoven's fugue to end fugues.