FINZI STRING QUARTET

SATURDAY 28th JANUARY 2012

Four little maids from school?

It is an accepted sign of aging that policemen look younger and younger, but
when did string quartets begin to look like schoolgirls?  This may well have
been the initial impression as the Finzi Quartet took to the stage at the
latest concert in Music Nairn's season.  But no sooner had the young players
launched into the Haydn B major Quartet op. 50 no. 1 than it was very clear
that the freshness of youth was accompanied with equal measures of musical
maturity.  The Prussian Quartets were Haydn's response to the six quartets
Mozart had dedicated to him, and the older master's customary ease with the
form is much in evidence.  A limited amount of creative material is worked
out with classical thoroughness in a work of exquisite proportions and
uncomplicated genius.  The Finzi Quartet's reading was delightfully detailed
and splendidly unanimous.

The profound F-major Quartet by Ravel, the composer's only essay in the
medium, was written in 1902/3 in the wake of ground-breaking quartets by
Franck and Debussy and is in many ways the direct opposite of the Haydn - a
large number of strikingly original ideas receive minimal development before
the composer passes on.  With its frequent use of octave passages and
diaphanous melodies this music sounds very, very French and occasionally
skirts around the curious otherworld inhabited by the chamber music of
Fauré.  Bold modulations, lush harmonies and quirky rhythms, including the
infectious 5/8 of the Finale, combine in a work which is both intriguing and
satisfying. The Finzi Quartet luxuriated in the work's exotic harmonic world
and visibly enjoyed the rhythmical complexities of this attractive piece.

The Finzi Quartet perform on a matching set of stringed instruments by the
French luthier Jean Baptiste Vuillaume - in fact only the upper three
instruments were used in Nairn.  Completed in 1863, they produce a modest but
beautifully blended sound, and were perhaps best suited to the Brahms
Quartet begun in 1865 and which completed the concert.  Inexplicably the
three Brahms' Quartets appear remarkably seldom in concert programmes, and
the opus 51 no 1 in c minor is perhaps the least heard of the lot.  Having
destroyed numerous juvenile Quartets which failed to reach his
astronomically high standards, Brahms worked on the two opus 51 Quartets for
some eight years eventually producing works of consistently high quality and
bristling with ideas.  With its yearning Romance, charmingly earthy Ländler
Allegretto and excitingly syncopated Finale the first of the two Quartets
shows Brahms at his most consummately professional and overtly expressive.
If their instruments seemed most at home in this beautifully crafted
repertoire, so did the musicians, and they gave us a powerful and
romantically charged reading of it.

If we were slightly disappointed that they had included none of their
diagnostic English repertoire in the present concert, this beautiful Brahms
was more than adequate compensation for a large and very enthusiastic Nairn
audience.

DJR