Australian String Quartet. Elder Hall. 16 May 2025
The Australian String Quartet’s current touring program, entitled Rapture, is as much a musical event as it is a concert. As one enters the graceful Elder Hall, the audience does so in dimmed light with the focus squarely on the empty chairs set in a semicircle on the wood panelled stage bathed in a dappled red light. Red; the colour of passion and love, indeed rapture. Musical expressions of love can be mawkish, but the ASQ’s program was anything but. It was passionate and visceral, and featured works by two strikingly different composers of the past – Beethoven and Janáček – and two contemporary composers – Vanessa Perica (b.1982), from Australia, and Osvaldo Golijov (b.1960) from Argentina. Perica’s composition is receiving its national première during the tour, and she attended the concert and accepted generous applause.
The members of the ASQ not only play passionately and technically well, but they also genuinely love the music they play, and develop a deep appreciation of the composers’ intentions. This gives them an edge, a razor-sharp interpretative edge that cuts through and reveals the very heart of the music. Indeed, listening to their interpretations is sometimes like hearing a piece for the first time. This was very much the case with Beethoven’s String Quartet No.11 in F minor, Op.95, known as Serioso, and Janáček’s String Quartet No.2, known as Intimate Letters. The ensemble’s approach to both gave one pause to reflect on the range of emotions and textures in both compositions.
The Beethoven is one of his shortest quartets, and it features genre-breaking approaches that are vanguards to new stylistic expressions. The ASQ captured the inherent tension, sense of urgency, and contrasting playful joy that the piece offers. The counterpoint was beautifully exposed.
The Janáček quartet was composed late in his life and is a musical homage to a younger married woman for whom he had a deep love. Janáček said of this quartet, "... the notes glow with all the dear things that we've experienced together. You stand behind every note, you, living, forceful, loving … but everything's still only longed for ... it's beautiful, strange, unrestrained, inspired, a composition beyond all the usual conventions". The ASQ managed to capture the eclecticism of the composition as it traverses Janáček’s emotional story. It traverses a gamut of emotions and just needs to be listened to, and watched, and the audience just loved it.
It is always a special experience when hearing a new work, and so much more special when it is written by a composer who is straddling genres. In his introductory remarks from the stage, ASQ leader Dale Barltrop commented that the ensemble had been ‘watching’ Vanessa Perica for a number of years (and she them!), and that her jazz background has influenced her foray into modern classical music. As one audience member remarked to this reviewer during the interval, “there’s a lot going on in that”. Perica’s String Quartet No.1 known as No feeling is final is rich with diverse melodies that are driven at a relentless pace as they evolve and become something new not to be repeated – there is no obvious (at least on a first listening) development and recapitulation of thematic material. The motifs are ephemeral; nothing is final! The rhythms are at times jazzy, and at other times seemingly rooted in French impressionist music. At times it is brash and discordant which is then tempered with almost minimalist expressions and hypnotically repeated patters such as in the style of Philip Glass or Steve Reich. This is Perica’s first string quartet, and one can almost not wait for her second!
The concert closes with Golijov’s heat rending Tenebrae for string quartet. (It was originally scored for soprano, clarinet, and string quartet.) The stage lights were dimmed even lower for the performance as a nod to an Easter tradition of progressively extinguishing candles one by one until the congregation is left in darkness. The composition is exquisitely contemplative, and Michael Dahlenburg is especially fine on cello, and Barltrop and Francesca Hiew give a master class in the art of playing violin at the softest levels of volume without the listener being aware of the actual beginning and ends of phrases and the mechanical harshness of bow scraping across strings.
At the end of the Golijov, the audience and the ensemble sat motionless and silent for a full fifteen seconds soaking up the occasion. Then there was unbridled applause with many on their feet wolf whistling.
What an event.
Kym Clayton
When: 16 May
Where: Elder Hall
Bookings: Closed
