Review: Endellion String Quartet
The Endellion String Quartet performed its first new year Cambridge concert of the current season at West Road on Wednesday evening. As ever, the auditorium was packed for a programme of substantial works by three of the greatest composers for string quartet: Haydn, Tchaikovsky and Beethoven, writes John Gilroy.
In his warm words of welcome, Andrew Watkinson (First Violin) reminded the audience that the Quartet was celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, and that it was on 20 January 1979 that as members they had had their first rehearsal together.
It is certain that a great many concert-goers on Wednesday evening will have been in attendance through all the years that the Endellions have been giving, in the words of a local artist, ‘instructive and elevating joy to their West Road audiences,’ and clearly the Quartet is very appreciative of that loyalty.
Cause for celebration indeed; although each of the works performed on Wednesday reflected, in different degrees, the rather comfortless January weather outside. As though to point this up, Haydn’s Op. 20 No. 5 in F minor, one of the so-called ‘Sun’ quartets, is anything but sunny.
It’s a rather melancholy work, with a sad interval just before the vigorous conclusion of the first movement anticipating the pensive Menuet, with its pauses and difficult timings. There follows a wistful, rather lovely, Adagio with the first violin providing elaborate ornamentation to the melody. The finale, a strenuous Bach-like fugue, seems to contribute a feeling of resignation, but this mood is interrupted by a disturbing, explosive passage in conclusion.
The first of Tchaikovsky’s three completed quartets, No. 1 Op.11 in D Major, draws on Russian folk traditions, a rustic droning in the first movement leading on to the melodic and justly celebrated Andante Cantabile with its brief allusion to the ‘Song of the Volga Boatmen’, a passage which is said to have reduced Tchaikovsky’s compatriot, Tolstoy, to tears as they attended a performance together.
The Endellion Quartet’s delivery of this beautiful movement created a focussed silence, almost tangible, in the audience. As this reviewer recalls, they produced an identical effect a year ago in the Andante Funèbre sequence while performing Tchaikovsky’s 3rd string quartet.
Beethoven’s Op. 59 No. 3 (‘Razumovsky’) concluded the programme. This profoundly intense composition concludes with a fugal moto perpetuo which is genuinely exciting, calling for sustained and maximum exertion on the part of all four participants. You’d have to be some musician to take this on, but the Endellions more than rose to the occasion leaving us in awe of their stunning virtuosity.
What fun (although ‘fun’ is perhaps not exactly the right word here) to play in a world-class string quartet; to share that intimate interdependency while delivering the music, and at the same time, as a small and concentrated unit allows, be able to enter into the very essence of each composition and discover its complexity and genius. The Endellion String Quartet have clocked up 40 years already, with their audiences calling determinedly for more of that ‘instructive and elevating joy’.
JOHN GILROY
