Festival Music

Chiaroscuro Quartet

Queens Hall

Hazel Rowland

four stars

WITH a first half consisting of two pre-Romantic composers, one might have expected that the expressive range of the Chiaroscuro Quartet would be limited. J.S. Bach’s instrumental music can seem drily academic, while Haydn may prioritise refinement over subjective feelings. But such emotional emptiness was entirely missing in the Chiaroscuro’s performance, which never fell short of riveting.

Playing excerpts from Bach’s The Art of Fugue, second violinist Pablo Hernán Benedí poignantly introduced the main subject. Although the ensemble played at a sedate pace, they maintained an underlying tension. It was fascinating watching these four instrumentalists works together for Bach’s fugal writing, as we could hear each of their individual roles in building the texture while simultaneously coming together as a single whole.

After the intensity of Bach, Haydn’s String Quartet in E-flat, Op. 76 No. 6 came as a playful contrast. The Chiaroscuros relished the first movement’s teasing pauses and dynamic contrasts, as well as the mixture of frantic playing and jollity in the third movement. But the real highlight was reserved for the slow second movement, where the simplicity of its stately melody allowed the quartet to show-off their sweet and serene string sound.

If the first half already demonstrated the Chiaroscuro Quartet’s expressive capabilities, then this was taken significantly further in Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden’ String Quartet. The pauses between the opening’s passionately severe chords were painful holes of silence that seemed to last far longer than they did in reality. Other than cellist Claire Thirion, the ensemble had been standing for the whole concert, which in Schubert’s highly dramatic work allowed first violinist Alina Ibragimova in particular to play with ruthless freedom.