Turner Sims Concert Hall, Southampton
Though they have recorded all four of Frank Bridge's string quartets for Naxos, the Magginis have never before performed the cycle live. At the Turner Sims Hall, they are including them in three concerts. Two are to follow in the autumn, but this first instalment included Bridge's Second and Third Quartets. Both are pivotal in a series that charts the composer's evolution from mild-mannered Edwardian conservatism to his own brand of modernism after the first world war, making them the most important quartets by a 20th-century British composer before Britten and Tippett.
In the Second, completed in 1915, that stylistic shift is already underway. The form and the shaping of the melodic lines remain conventional, and the peculiarly English urge to rhapsodise has not quite been eradicated, but the harmonies have a chromatic tinge, and the contrapuntal strands within the string textures are beginning to assert their independence. By the time of the Third, 12 years later, that transformation is complete: indebted to Bart�k and Berg (whose Lyric Suite it uncannily prefigures), the music is consistently chromatic, without ever losing touch with tonality, and bound together by a network of short, potent motifs.
The Third is a masterpiece, and the Magginis' performance left no doubts about its stature. Their command of this music is remarkable; their sound is not especially sumptuous, and in the denser textures a bit more depth would have been welcome. But their lucid presentation of both large-scale structure and rhythmic and harmonic detail was exemplary.
Jill Arrington Tami Donaldson Padma Lakshmi Sarah Mutch Gabrielle Union
No comments:
Post a Comment