Heath & Guillami String Quartets (From Darlington and Stockton Times)

Heath & Guillami String Quartets

2:12pm Friday 26th June 2009

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LAUNCHING this year’s festival was a young ensemble becoming well-known in the region after recent appearances at Swaledale Festival and Bishop Auckland.

At Aldborough church, the young members of the Heath String Quartet showed they have gained in sharpness and assurance with each performance.

The opening Haydn String Quartet in D, The Frog (so named after the bariolage effect in the final movement), was the common factor in each concert, and the players have developed remarkably in its execution.

Against this they set Thomas Adès’ Arcadiana Quartet of 1994. New to most of the audience, it perhaps needs a degree of acclimatisation.

Even so, the movement drawn from Watteau’s painting Embarkation from the Island of Cythera had degree of romantic impressionism, and the final Lethe’s hushed cello line drew a quiet ending to the arcadian theme.

With Mendelssohn’s 6th Quartet in F minor, op 80, written in the year he died, they returned to the Romantic age with passionate playing that caught the essence of his youthful spirit, lyricism in the ebb and flow of the adagio and attack in the final pages.

The next morning, Stockeld Park Chapel was well-filled for another young ensemble, the Guillami String Quartet, whose qualities were displayed in quartets by Mozart, Shostakovich and Beethoven.

Mozart produced his 1st Quartet in G major, K 80 at just 14 years of age, and the Guillami brought matching youthfulness and vigour to the melodic line.

Shostakovich’s 7th, F sharp minor String Quartet, composed under the shadow of Soviet totalitarianism in 1956, presages the anti-war imagery of the 8th Quartet and echoes the composer’s experiences of living through the Siege of Leningrad in 1941- 44. To this, the ensemble brought remarkably graphic playing.

Perhaps this had an effect on their opening bars of Beethoven’s Rasumovsky Quartet in C, op 58/6. Plangent and resonant as they drove the music forward, elsewhere a little straightfaced, but with courtly elegance in the minuet and firmly driven through the extended final powerful fugue.

Dave Robson

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