IF Bruckner's symphonies are majestic cathedrals, then his F major String Quintet is a side chapel which tends to pass unnoticed yet is unmistakably the handiwork of the great master of Austrian musical architecture.
To hear it in Battleby House's circular conference hall - itself an interesting piece of architecture, with an appropriately domelike ceiling - was thus a special treat, even if the surroundings did not produce the resonance all Bruckner's music ideally needs.
In what was clearly a sympathetic Perth Festival performance led by Ernst Kovacic, the music tended to stop dead in its tracks at those moments where, after a loud chord and a pause, the sound is meant to hang lingeringly in the air. But perhaps Bruckner was asking the impossible of five string players to achieve the sort of effects which, in other works, have an array of brass instruments at their service. What was fascinating about the performance was how Kovacic and his colleagues solved so many of the work's problems, making sense of the fragmented, clodhopping scherzo and sustaining admirably the tonal intensity of the tremendous 15-minute adagio. If, after this, the finale overstretched their resources, the shortcomings were forgivable.
Happily, by the time they reached Brahms's G major String Quintet - a shorter but scarcely less problematic work - the players had regained their energy. With Kovacic now playing one of the two viola parts which give this work so much of its autumnal colouring, this received a performance wonderfully attuned not only to the music's prevailing sense of melancholy but to the surges of energy with which Brahms sought to overcome it.
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