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Top festival for chamber music
REVIEW - LONDON FESTIVAL OF CHAMBER MUSIC
Emmanuel Church
by Jan Toporowski
THE English String Quartet are now in the 12th season of their London Festival of Chamber Music, a series of concerts that they repeat, without a trace of affectation or routine, each week in Palmers Green, Wimbledon, North Dulwich and West Hampstead.
Last Saturday’s concert featured string quintets by Luigi Boccherini (inventor of the string quintet) and Felix Mendelssohn, and Erich Korngold’s string sextet, all of them masterpieces that are too rarely heard today.
The Boccherini quintet Op 37, No 2 gave us an insight into 18th-century chamber music making, a conversation between string players that allowed plenty of scope for the second cello (which Boccherini would have played) to show off virtuoso playing.
Boccherini’s part was taken by the English String Quartet’s cellist Nick Holland, seconded by a guest cellist, Nick Cooper.
The Mendelssohn Quintet, in A major, Opus 18, was another product of that 19th century prodigy’s precocious teenage years.
Mendelssohn wrote his two string quintets, like Mozart had written his, for a lighter combination of a string quartet with an additional viola, rather than an additional cello.
With Ivo-Jan van der Werff as the additional viola, the quintet sparkled along, despite an elegiac slow intermezzo movement that Mendelssohn added later to his original quintet, to commemorate the death of his violin teacher Eduard Rietz.
The final work was Korngold’s sextet, a remarkable composition, neglected until recently in the concert hall.
This was written in the early years of the 20th century, when this child prodigy was astonishing Vienna with his compositions.
In his introduction and lecture notes, the English String Quartet’s distinguished viola player Luciano Iorio highlighted his Hollywood career, as a leading composer of film music, followed by his frustrated attempts to resume a career as a composer of serious music.
These days one would like to think that his Hollywood paymasters had destroyed his talent, for much the same reasons that Graham Greene had advised aspiring writers to avoid advertising, or Tolstoy had decried journalism.
But really it was Hitler who destroyed the musical milieu that had nurtured and responded to Korngold’s talents.
Those talents are abundantly displayed in the luscious harmonies and rhythmic vitality of the sextet. In the hands of the English String Quartet with Ivo-Jan van der Werff and Nick Cooper it came across as one of the major chamber works of the 20th century, and reminded the audience of what a wonderful violinist the Quartet have in Diana Cummings.
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