Carducci Quartet’s music has a special aura

Dec 8 2010 Huddersfield Daily Examiner

REVIEW

TITLE: Carducci Quartet

VENUE: Huddersfield St Paul’s HallREVIEW: Chris Robins

PHILIP Glass wrote string quartets in moments of introspection.

“String quartets have always functioned like that for composers,” he has said – and it is certainly true of the Carducci Quartet’s programme for their Huddersfield Music Society concert.

Glass’ Second Quartet of 1983, which began life as incidental music to a Samuel Beckett soliloquy in which a dying man comes to terms with his solitude, is beyond introspection.

Its pulsating and ever-changing rhythms under sweet melodies fizzle out into the ether.

As Beckett wrote: “In the end labour lost and silence. And you as you always were. Alone.”

The Carduccis have a special tonal resonance – a kind of sound aura that seems to hover about them.

They were ideal advocates for Glass and also for a contrasting, though equally inward-looking 20th century work – the A minor quartet by Ernest John Moeran. It sounds like George Butterworth orchestrated by Ravel but becoming progressively more Irish in its themes. Well, it is a complex work!

If the end of its first movement was not far from the profound emotion of the Beethoven which ended the concert, then Glass’ dissonances were not far from those of the Haydn that began it.

The Carduccis played Haydn’s E flat Quartet, subtitled The Joke, with sparkling relish, particularly the introspectively whimsical glissandi in its trio – that’s Haydn for you – and rose to the challenge of Beethoven’s F Minor Quartet, subtitled Serioso.

It has a range of emotions compressed into its short length and the Carducci’s care in expression ensured that we missed nothing.