While London’s musicians and music lovers continue to wring their hands about our capital having no world-beating concert hall for symphonic music — yet — we all count our blessings at Wigmore Hall’s permanent festival programming.
Opened in 1901 as Bechstein Hall, adjacent to the German piano manufacturer’s showrooms, the “Wiggy” soon became a magnet for the stars of the worlds of song and chamber music — although, like most British institutions, it has had its ups and downs. I remember early visits when the hall was mainly a showcase for London debutants and looked a bit dog-eared, before the deluxe renovations and extensions undertaken by the current director, John Gilhooly, and his predecessor, William Lyne.
In almost any week, one could pinpoint four or five must-hear concerts by artists of world-class stature. Last month, Martha Argerich made a rare appearance (in tandem with her pianist colleague and compatriot Alberto Portugheis), while Renée Fleming took time out from rehearsals of Der Rosenkavalier to show off her jazz credentials — and, I’m told, her rendition of Jingle Bells — to a packed and apparently delighted audience.
Inevitably, prices for such star-studded events are higher than average, but you can still get a good seat in the stalls for most concerts for £20. The hour-long Sunday-morning “coffee concerts” (with a glass of sherry thrown in, if you prefer) are even more of a bargain at £13 and £15.
Last weekend’s fare offered a mini fest of string quartets. If the Wigmore is internationally acknowledged as one of the world’s most important halls for art song, it is even more so the London home of all the leading string quartets. On consecutive nights, Saturday and Sunday, the mainly Spanish Cuarteto Casals — whose viola player, Jonathan Brown, is American — traversed Mozart’s set of six quartets dedicated to his friend and colleague Joseph Haydn. These works represent not only the composer’s greatest essays in the string-quartet genre, but a high point of quartet writing in the 18th century. Produced between 1782 and 1785, they look back to Haydn’s Op 33 set of 1782 and provided inspiration for that composer’s later quartets, especially those written after Mozart’s death, such as the great Op 76 set.
Advertisement
The Casals players’ approach could hardly be more removed from the classical “Viennese” style enshrined in discs of the pre- and postwar eras by luminaries such as the Budapest, Amadeus and Vienna quartets. Though they don’t copy the strict period manners and style of, say, Quatuor Mosaïques, they use 18th-century bows (or copies of them) and gut strings, producing a leaner, more astringent sound than we are used to. In complex contrapuntal movements such as the fugal finale of the first of the set, K387 — a movement surely unprecedented before the great finale of the Jupiter Symphony — the transparency and clarity of texture is all gain, even if they sometimes miss the whipped-cream sweetness of the Viennese tradition in the slow movements.
Even so, the great andante of the A major quartet, K464, arguably the pinnacle of Mozart’s achievement in this music, and the singing andante cantabile of the “Dissonance” in C, K465, were moments when time seemed to stop, as their leader, Abel Tomas, soared over the gently throbbing accompaniment with improvisatory flourishes of rare and rapt beauty. Throughout, one was conscious of the “difficulty” — from the point of view of audiences, rather than players — that Leopold Mozart pinpointed in his encouragement of his son to write more accessible music. By any standards, this is experimental music, avant-garde for its day, with its abrupt lurches into emotionally contrasting keys and chromaticisms in minuets that sound light years away from the “popular” ballroom dances Mozart wrote during his Vienna years. These performances may not always have been easy on the ear, but that was surely part of Mozart’s intention. This is not meant to be comfort music.
Monday’s programme by the Danish String Quartet — winners of the London International Competition, hosted by the Wigmore, in 2009 — could hardly have offered a starker contrast. This young quartet programme adventurously. Alfred Schnittke’s String Quartet No 3 (1983) was sandwiched between classical Viennese fare: Haydn’s D major quartet, Op 76, No 5, and the second of Beethoven’s Op 59 “Razumovsky” quartets, the one with the tune later used by Musorgsky in Boris Godunov. They drew a younger than usual crowd, and a noisier one, judging by the whoops of applause at the end.
The four young Danes have cultivated a modern, casual look, too, with their uniform black outfits, but there is nothing laid-back about their playing. The Schnittke is a gritty, dark work, channelling styles from Renaissance polyphony to late Shostakovich, and they dispatched its 15-minute span with impressive commitment and intensity. Their Haydn and Beethoven, too, felt modern and challenging, and their encore, a transcription of a medieval Danish “traditional” tune, I Dreamt a Dream, was lapped up by the audience.
Like the Danes, the Novus Quartet, from South Korea, swap the two violinists for different works. For their Sunday-morning Wigmore debut, they chose a programme of almost unremitting agitato and angst: Schubert’s famous Quartet Movement, from an unfinished work in C minor; Mendelssohn’s F minor quartet, Op 80, written in 1847, the last year of the composer’s short, turbulent life; and Beethoven’s Op 95 “Serioso”, in the same key.
Advertisement
These players are in their mid-twenties, but already display technical address and musical instincts beyond their years, relishing the emotional highs and lows of these composers’ most restless idioms. They’ll be back as part of Wigmore Hall’s survey of Haydn’s Quartets, from Op 33 onwards, next season.