Alan Cooper reviews: Smith Quartet
sound in association with Lunchbreaks at Cowdray Hall
Smith Quartet
Aberdeen Art Gallery
Saturday, 08 November 2014
The Smith Quartet opened Saturday’s Lunchbreak performance with a Quartet by South African-born composer Kevin Volans – just as they had at their concert in Woodend Barn the previous evening. The Quartet No.2 “Hunting: Gathering” however was radically different from the Quartet No. 10 which we heard last night. The title refers to the multiple and very disparate sources of fragments of music which have gone into the construction of the work. It is without doubt very interesting to be told that at bar 65, “there’s a fleeting reference to a variant of the Shona mbira tune Nyamaropa (Zimbabwe)”. Does this mean much to the average listener however? I think not. In order to fully comprehend such details it would be necessary to study the score along with the relevant African Source materials. Possibly nowadays the Internet would be helpful in that such things can be called up without having to journey all the way to Zimbabwe. It is quite amazing what you can dig up on there! However to fully comprehend all such inter-musical references it would probably mean weeks if not years of painstaking research. What is important to the average listener is surely the music itself and the impression it makes on the ears and in the mind. Well, here goes!
The work is in three quite distinctive movements. It opened with a kind of tick-tock pizzicato which kept recurring in larger or smaller sections throughout the movement. Actually an impression was gained that this minimalist motif was continuing unceasingly throughout the movement – though sometimes it went underground. Viola player Nic Pendlebury is very much in the limelight in this movement with soaring melodic lines that do have a minimalist element to them though that is not really the impact they have on the listener. Perhaps that is why Volans is listed as being a post-minimalist composer.
The rhythmic writing in the second movement is complex indeed with the cello played by Deirdre Cooper providing a kind of anchor with her pizzicato playing. Yet really the whole thing, filled with treacherous cross rhythms, must be unbelievably difficult to keep on track and only world experts like the Smith Quartet would be up to it – so it was a privilege indeed to hear this fantastic live performance. The tick-tock motif from the opening movement recurred a couple of times thus binding this movement to its predecessor. In the final movement that tick-tock was exchanged for something more like a heartbeat and with chords played by muted instruments. Only the cello remained unmuted. Light touches of harmonics were passed across the instruments with the cellist having to join in with these too while maintaining her constant pizzicato heartbeat – a real tour de force of playing. All in all, this was a wonderfully colourful work that lived up to its title “Hunting: Gathering”. Even if we could not really understand fully from whence Volans was getting all his ingredients he (and the Smith Quartet) certainly served up some absolutely delicious listening.
Tunde Jegede was born in England but has researched African musical sources. His piece Dancing in the Spirit was specifically arranged for the Smith Quartet. Jegede is exceptionally eclectic in his musical understanding with knowledge of everything from Western classical music to pop. Dancing in the Spirit was originally done in collaboration with Random Dance Company and choreographer Wayne McGregor thus taking us back to one of the themes of sound‘s opening weekend, namely dance. If the viola was highlighted in the opening movement of the first work it was the cello who was gifted a similar treatment in Tunde Jegede’s piece. Above a cello pedal note we heard baroque sounding harmonies and counterpoint with just a touch of minimalist seasoning. Then the idea of dance became clearer with I thought more than just a suggestion of Irish music.
Michael Nyman’s String Quartet No. 5 had a touch of humour in its subtitle: “Let’s not make a song and dance out of this” because each of the six movements is either a song or a dance. This piece went down particularly well with Saturday’s full house audience. While there was at least one movement in which the four instruments were playing harmonies in perfect parallel what was truly amazing especially from a minimalist composer was that in some of the movements each instrument had its own highly contrasting component to make up the musical whole – pizzicato against slow bowing, slow bowing against fast bowing and guitar-like strums for the cello. The players all looked to be doing something very different yet everything slotted together perfectly. In the opening section of the final movement the second violin sang out the melody with the first violin shadowing him on harmonics. The echoing of the first two movements in the finale was particularly satisfying – something that many earlier composers have used to great effect e.g. Dvořák.
© Alan Cooper
