Haydn String Quartet in D "Lark", Op.64 No.5 Webern Six Bagatelles for String Quartet, Op.9 Wolf Italian Serenade Schubert String Quintet in C, D.956 Australian String Quartet Natsuko Yoshimoto, James Cuddeford, violin Jeremy Williams, viola Niall Brown, cello with Li-Wei guest, cello (Schubert)City Recital Hall Angel Place 28 July 2005

THE THIRD CONCERT of the Australian String Quartet's 2005 national season is "Take Flight", and although there is a literal correlation with Haydn's "Lark" Quartet, I'm not sure how the aviatory metaphor quite fits in with the Webern Bagatelles, Wolf's Serenade and Schubert's mighty C major Quintet. But the ASQ are evidently a very musical team, and collectively they produce a warm, pleasing timbre which is spacious and well-blended, further enhanced by the natural cushioning acoustic of the City Recital Hall.

Take the opening of the Haydn (right), for instance, and Natsuko-san’s first violin melody which simply soars rapturously after her colleagues have given the contrasting foursquare march in the opening bars. Her expansive melody line is winsome, even indulgent, phrasing in long-breathed lines, and supported with great sensitivity by her more earthbound companions, here as well as in the inner movements. I also especially appreciated that they dispatched the finale at a true presto, with sharply etched details in the florid passages, yet without overplaying the running notes for the sake of mere artifice.

The music of the Second Viennese School isn’t necessarily the first (or even hundredth) thing one plays for recreational listening, so it’s always nice to have the opportunity to hear some when it appears on a recital program. (A spoonful of sugar, as a certain English nanny once asserted, helps the medicine go down.) Webern is not as dyspeptic as his reputation suggests, particularly since almost all of his mature writing consists of miniature sound-bites, economical to the point of unintelligibility, with movements lasting a minute or less. He handles and positions sounds with surgical precision, so much so that the result in statu nascendi is a juxtaposition between extreme brevity and extraordinary expressiveness.

Listening to Webern (left), I think, is like the proverbial tale of five blind men trying to describe an elephant, or perhaps watching one of those modern television handphones ads: we are teased and only allowed to see bits and pieces at any time, never the whole, and strictly have to rely on our imaginations to fill in the blanks. Such was the case in the Six Bagatelles, in which the ASQ carved out every last scrap of syncopated angle and textural detail in Webern’s miniatures with a certain strenuousness that illuminated, as much as it served to delineate, his strange aesthetic. An inspiring and memorable conception by the ASQ.

The aforesaid dose of sugar followed in the form of Wolf’s Italian Serenade, a confection of terpsichorean melodies which is a popular party-piece for encores. Niall Brown’s cello cantilena in the middle section was something to be savoured, and the playing was on the whole fleet and forward-moving through the pulsating rhythms, even if the reading elsewhere was rather generalized and perhaps not quite as exhilarating as the preceding works.

Speaking of parties, the second half was wholly given over to the only composer who was so well-loved by his mates as to have a type of social event named after him. Schubert’s two string quintets, curiously, come at opposite ends of his compositional career: the first is a fourteen-year-old’s quintet-overture in C minor (with double violas), while the second is a thirty-one-year-old’s swan song and a magnum opus in chamber music. (The only other quintet Schubert wrote was, of course, the “Trout” for piano and string quartet.)

Guest cellist Li-Wei joined the ASQ for this item, contributing a dimension of sonic opulence and volume hitherto unavailable to the standard quartet. Both James Cuddeford and Natsuko Yoshimoto have known Li-Wei from their days at Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, and they play their Schubert with all the affection it deserves. The contribution of violist Jeremy Williams, as the harmonic pivot of the work, cannot be underrated here, and he gives a-plenty as the inner voice over which the melodic lines float.

The Middle Instrument The crux of Schubert’s stroke of genius and simplicity here was the emancipation of the viola and placing it between the two antiphonal choirs of paired violins and cellos. As the fulcrum of the quintet, the viola would side with one pair of instruments, then the other pair, underpinning the entire work and to some extent, even steering the tack and course of the music. Schubert could not have failed to appreciate the significance of this role: in the family Schubertiads (pictured above), he would play the viola while his brothers played the violins and his father the cello.

The ASQ’s intensity of emotion and concentration in the first two movements reminded me of the two similar movements of the same composer’s Unfinished Symphony: on the one hand, they achieve something so ineffably beautiful from printed notes on a piece of paper that you don’t want it to end, and on the other hand, the beauty hurts so much you really need the jolly, upbeat catharsis from the last two movements to recover - which they dispatched with cool effulgence and majestic utterance.

The rollicking Scherzo and the Bohemian-flavoured finale might seem to belie the romantic notion that Schubert wrote his last chamber work with a presentiment of death. Yet, the ASQ (and guest) so aptly pointed up the struggle and dichotomy between classical Viennese jollity and angsty Romantic pathos, so characteristic of Schubert’s music, which makes for great musical drama in the right hands – as was the case here.

From top to bottom, the quality of the ASQ’s string playing is always full of elegance and finesse, so much so that one could easily believe they are quite incapable of making an ugly sound if they tried (and not even in the Webern, either.) Coincidentally enough, this concert was preceded with the launch party of their new album (ABC 476 7741) which contains Dvorak’s 10th and 12th String Quartets (the “American”) and four of the Cypresses as filler. While I’m admittedly partial to the Lindsay and Stamitz Quartets for Dvorak quartet recordings, I found this new release with lots of delights and insights to offer. I look forward to hearing more from them in future.