Review

TITLE: Coull String Quartet

VENUE: St. Paul’s Hall, Huddersfield

BY Chris Robins

HUDDERSFIELD Music Society’s guests, the Coull String Quartet, cancelled their scheduled date six weeks ago being snowbound elsewhere, and the re-arranged appearance proved worth the wait.

They opened with Mozart’s K421 D minor Quartet, one of the most febrile and restless in the repertoire. Thoughtfully measured tempos set the general scene of anxiety.

Tiny commas between some phrases in the first three movements, plus carefully sited accents, disturbed the flow enough to keep things edgy and brittle. In the siciliano finale the Coulls allowed more flow – a melancholy acceptance of the previous movements’ anxieties.

Ravel’s only Quartet is a major work by a man described by contemporary music giant Louis Andriessen - here in Huddersfield as it happens – as the best composer of the 20th century.

It drew the best playing of the evening, committed and assured, and with fewer of the intonation niggles that bedeviled the Mozart. The rich variety of Ravel’s harmonic and melodic invention was laid before us in a tonal palette ranging from transparent to robust – particularly in the third movement – and the Coulls presented it all without clouding the work’s architecture or allowing it to become sensational.

Throughout the evening there was something unyielding about the Coulls’ tone, however, held back from full opulence even in the gaudier bits of Ravel, but it was fuller in Mendelssohn’s Op.44 E minor Quartet.

They did justice to its technical and melodic accomplishments, but could not do the impossible – finding what Mendelssohn is really expressing – if anything - in this work.