Music
Elias String Quartet, City Hall, Glasgow
Michael Tumelty
Five stars
WHAT a marathon occasion on Sunday afternoon in the City Hall, with concerts and a related event running for four and a half hours as the concluding and climactic day in Glasgow’s three-year survey of Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas and String Quartets with Llyr Williams and the Elias String Quartet.
The biggest workload of the afternoon fell on the Elias Quartet. I was unkind to them in one of my reviews, so I’ll offset that now by pointing to the extraordinary job they did with analyst and presenter Richard Wigmore in de-constructing and re-assembling the Grosse Fugue (Great Fugue), the hardest piece ever written, a total beast of a composition, and one which bites. They literally took it to bits, with the Elias demonstrating what went with what, and what went against what, and the first violinist pointing out a critical moment where Beethoven put down the rivet gun, and smiled.
In a way it’s a horrible piece, vicious, brutal and light years beyond discordant: in it, Beethoven battered music into the future. And the Elias Quartet, using all of their physicality and youth, fell on it with zest, topping out the session with an uninterrupted play-through where all of their intellectual and analytical work made the logic of the Fugue persuasive, and its musical argument irresistible.
Later, in two of the late quartets, the last, opus 135, and the searching opus 131, the Elias showed mastery of the ultra-concise 135, with some gorgeous playing in the slow movement, if a little less cogency in the 131, a very tough piece that strays far from all norms.
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