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Andrew Liddle
Guest Writer
5:35 PM 22nd November 2019
arts

Maxwell Quartet In The Round

 
Maxwell Quartet
Maxwell Quartet
Twice this week the acoustics of Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre have been tested and found to be perfect. Monday was opera night and Thursday offered the rare opportunity to see and hear at close hand, intimately in the round, one of the country’s much acclaimed young string quartets, Maxwell Quartet, offering a lively and varied programme of chamber music.

A fit audience though few, as English poet John Milton might have euphemistically phrased it, were richly rewarded for turning out on a bitterly cold night, reminding me of Gustav Mahler’s comment that chamber music originally was written to be heard in a small space by a small audience. They were immediately warmed by Mozart’s The Hunt, one of the liveliest and most untroubled of the six string quartets that the composer dedicated to Haydn.

It begins at a playful canter before giving free rein to Colin Scobie, first violin, George Smith, second violin and Elliot Perks, viola, suddenly taking off at a gallop - undoubtedly the reason for its affectionate sobriquet. It’s a beautiful programmatic piece, redolent of the joys of the countryside, capturing movement through forest and meadows, the dark or light of passing through and beyond trees. The adagio, bringing forth meltingly beautiful phrases from the cello of Duncan Strachan, was particularly affecting before the unbridled merriment of the coda.

Debussy was perhaps the first modern musical voice, the first major composer to cut ties with nineteenth-century century Romanticism, evolving from Beethoven to Wagner. He offered something radically different. His Quartet in G minor is now as famous, perhaps, for the scherzo’s mercurial pizzicati, which as ever caused a stirring in the audience, as for its free variations and absence of a main theme that baffled contemporary critics. Maxwell are to be complimented on their modulations of light and tone and their ability to capture the sensation of the fleeting moment, especially in the slow movement. Especially striking was the rhythmic vitality and extreme agility of their playing demanded by the composer’s rapidly changing tempi and cross-rhythms, his bewildering transformations of melody, harmony and texture.

After the interval, the pièce de résistance, Schubert’s immortal, Death and the Maiden, an ultra-dramatic piece as thus presented, was a thing of rare vitality and vivacity, overflowing with energy from the opening blitz to the final meltdown. Scobie, his face fierce with concentration, was the very model of a first violin immersed in the tension of the piece, caught up by the urgency of the high solo lines that communicated a sense of danger. By contrast, the beautiful fifth variation of the second movement was all sombre and subdued, caught perfectly by the melancholia of Strachan’s cello, resignation and enigma seeming to hang in the air on his very notes. The third movement was a bravura tussle between all four players, an ominous struggle for ascendancy, a fanning of flames before the final glorious conflagration of the tarantella.

Maxwell Quartet are from Scotland and took obvious pride in the short incidental pieces of national provenance they used as encores at the end of both halves. I took particular pleasure from the sprightly folky piece from the pen of Neil Gow, the Scottish fiddler and contemporary of Robert Burns, who added words to one of his compositions.

Music In the Round, a leading national promoter of chamber music, have found a choice venue and it is must be a fervent wish that they present other concerts here.

Maxwell Quartet were at the SJT, on 21 November.