PERHAPS I'm imagining this, but has the basic sound of the Edinburgh Quartet become bigger in the year it has been led by Jane Murdoch? It seemed so yesterday, the second time I've heard the group in a fortnight. By bigger I don't mean louder. The volume of a group is absolutely controlled by the acoustic it plays in. But in Puccini's delicious little ballad for string quartet, Crisantemi - a pulsating work, warmly played by the Quartet - it did appear the group was exhibiting a richer sound than it did in the past.
If this is the case, it stems from the top. There is a breadth and
depth to Jane Murdoch's sound that warms the music she plays and filters down through the group.
Even at the opening of the main piece yesterday - Shostakovich's austere Eighth String Quartet - that quality in her playing, transmitted through the others, gave an unusually human face to music that can seem exclusively bleak.
And in the many slow and soft passages, another feature of Murdoch's playing imposed itself on the interpretation: sustained, subdued, expressive sound that melted some of the ice on this wonderfully profound, almost forbidding music.
even the main theme of the
quartet (forever associated with the Bill Paterson drugs-drama, Traffik) assumed a poignant, lyrical profile.
If there was one weakness, it was in the explosive second movement, which was taken so fast it lost its inexorable drive. A notch down would have been more effective.
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