Gringolts Quartet, EIF music review: ‘magnificent and revelatory’
Even the full five stars can’t quite do justice to the intellectually and emotionally breathtaking achievements of the Gringolts Quartet, writes David Kettle
Gringolts Quartet ★★★★★
Queen’s Hall
There are times when a meagre star rating just doesn’t do a concert justice, and the Gringolts Quartet’s magnificent, revelatory International Festival recital was one of them. On paper, it was going to be an old-meets-new collision of Schubert’s mammoth G major Quartet D887 with some pithier, more acerbic and deeply idiosyncratic recent works by Hungarian iconoclast Gyorgy Kurtag, who turned 100 this year. That’s unusual and interesting in itself, and certainly high-concept, but it did little to prepare for the cunningly conceived, deeply felt performance that the Gringolts ensemble delivered.
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For a start, exploding the Schubert Quartet into effectively four separate pieces actually makes a lot of sense. Its four constituent movements feel like substantial-scale pieces on their own, and their heft and power ensures they remain vividly in the mind even when separated by other music. And in the Gringolts players’ hands, that power was even more pronounced: these were fiery, furious accounts that emphasised the extremes of Schubert’s deeply polarised creation, and its precarious balance between light and dark, joy and grief.
The second movement, for example, felt like a brutal collision between two irreconcilable musics, with the calmer, quieter, more lyrical first changed irrevocably as a result of the encounter. It might not have been for everyone, but it was a performance that forced itself into your consciousness and memory.
Interspersed between the Schubert movements, the jewel-like miniatures of Kurtag’s Officium breve, Hommage a Jacob Obrecht and Microludes got similarly vivid treatments that zoned in with fearsome precision on their eccentric gestures or their almost tactile textures, but also drew telling connections between the two composers, almost as though Kurtag and the Gringolts players were taking a microscope to some of Schubert’s fleeting moments and dissecting them in unforgiving detail.
It was a breathtaking achievement, both intellectually and emotionally - and even suggested, contrary to International Festival’s ill-advised marketing slogan, that we might be able to think and feel. David Kettle
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