Endellion String Quartet 40th Anniversary Concert
Reflecting on a long and shared career, cellist David Waterman said that it was the riches of the quartet repertoire that had kept the Endellion String Quartet together.
And if any musicians have good cause to celebrate their confraternity, it’s the Endellions, if only for their creation of the delight they must have witnessed again and again among audiences at their Cambridge performances. 40 years is a long time to sustain it.
Wednesday evening’s final concert in the 40th anniversary season contained 4 short specially commissioned pieces framed by two of the greatest composers for strings, Mozart and Schubert.
Mozart’s Quartet No. 19 K.465, known as the ‘Dissonance’ because of its slow, minute or so length dissonant opening, commenced the programme. The Endellion quartet played the composition flawlessly, from the sprightly Haydnesque first movement, through the warm and lyrical Andante Cantabile, to the urgent Allegro Molto final movement. Especially engaging, though, was its delivery of the 3rd movement Menuetto, a charming melodic sequence in the form of a rondo with the instruments in conversation with each other to provide a satisfying sense of unity and containment.
David Waterman then announced that the quartet, as part of their 40th anniversary celebrations would perform 4 modern pieces, 3 of which had been premiered on the previous evening. He said that the reason to commission these comparatively short works was that, unlike say in piano literature, short pieces were missing from the string repertoire and that this was an attempt to rectify that situation.
Jonathan Dove’s ‘Vanishing Gold’ was a moving ‘piece for our age’, taking its inspiration from the probable extinction of two tiny golden amphibians, one a Costa Rican toad, the other the golden coqui of Puerto Rico whose two-note call was replicated on the violin in this short work with a very tragic feel to it.
Giles Swayne, one-time composer-in-residence at Clare College (2001-14) had provided ‘Endellionigma’, an ingenious composition in which the quartet’s four instruments coadunate to play finally as one single instrument.
Thai composer Prach Boondiskulchok came next. The hardest thing about presenting these compositions, quipped Waterman, was how to pronounce his name!
‘Ritus: Four pictures for String Quartet’ was a combination of the melodic and dissonant, one passage involving Ralph de Souza’s pizzicato second violin in conversation with a bit of cello slapping by David Waterman. The title of the piece was inspired both by the Sanskrit word ‘ritu’, meaning appropriately a ’period of time’, and equally appropriately by the Latin word for a ‘ceremony’.
The final piece before the interval was ‘A Myndin’ [something given to remind you] for the Endellion String Quartet’ by Sally Beamish, whose love for Scotland was reflected in yearning strings that conjure the landscapes amongst which she’d once lived and had now left behind.
Finally came one of the greatest of all string quartets, No. 14 in D minor, known as ‘Death and the Maiden’, composed by Schubert when his health was seriously undermined, and an example of how supreme artistry has often proved itself through history to be somehow indifferent to the worst of personal circumstances. It was a showpiece that demonstrated the Endellions’ great musicianship (to say nothing of stamina) and a fitting conclusion to the 40 very distinguished years of their Cambridge residency.
JOHN GILROY
