Australian String Quartet streamed concerts make best of bad thing

Australia’s flagship string quartet the ASQ is streaming Sunday concerts in hour-long bites mixing performance with behind the scenes lifestyle featurettes.

ASQ are appearing in a series of eight Sunday afternoon webcasts.

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Australia’s flagship string quartet the ASQ is streaming a series of Sunday afternoon concerts in hour-long bites which mix performance with behind the scenes “lifestyle” featurettes.

The Adelaide-based group – Dale Barltrop and Francesca Hiew, violins, violist Stephen King and cellist Sharon Grigoryan – have had to can their 2020 touring season due to COVID-19, and a Zoom performance proved less than ideal, so these streamed live performances in front of a small audience in the spectacular Ukaria concert hall in the Adelaide Hills are as good as it gets in these lockdown times.

Subscriptions to the series cost $40 and subscribers can watch previous webcasts in the series until the end of October. The concerts got under way on August 2 with a performance of Mendelssohn’s powerful F minor quartet Op 80 which was written near the end of his life and was dedicated to his beloved sister Fanny who had had died shortly before.

The anger and grief of the opening movement is uncharacteristic of the normally sunny composer’s work, and this is offset by a beautiful and wistfully sad adagio. The ASQ’s performance is cutting edge. This is their fifth year in their present line-up – the best of the three incarnations this reviewer has seen and heard – but sadly that is to change at the end of the year when Grigoryan leaves to spend more time with her young family and to perform with her husband, star classical guitarist Slava.

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She will be replaced by Michael Dahlenburg, who filled in for her when she went on maternity leave in 2018.

The episodes are hosted by singer and writer Johanna Allen who introduces us to the musicians and talks about their likes and interests.

Ulrike Klein at her Ukaria cultural centre at Mt Barker. Picture: Calum Robertson

The first show also introduces us to the ASQ’s benefactor Ulrike Klein, co-founder of the Jurlique cosmetic firm, who funded Ukaria, as well as purchasing the stunning quartet of Guadagnini instruments on loan to the musicians. Allen does a good job of making the hour entertaining and the quality of the music, of course, speaks for itself. The non-musical segments also feature Aboriginal poet Mandy Brown, and future episodes include interviews with luthiers, gardeners and cook Maggie Beer.

The works are performed before a socially distanced audience with the players seated before Ukaria’s glass wall looking out on the spectacular tree-clad scenery towards Mt Barker.

Each performance is followed by a Q & A session where the musicians answer questions from the audience.

The Mendelssohn webcast and the following week’s performance of Paul Stanhope’s String Quartet No. 3, inspired by a first nations story from Western Australia’s Kimberley Region, are available to stream now. Coming up — all streaming at 3pm on a Sunday — are Dvorak’s Piano Quintet with pianist Konstantin Shamray (August 16); the world premiere of Ross Edwards’s fourth quartet (August 23); Mozart’s Dissonance Quartet (August 30); Matthew Hindson’s Quartet No. 3 (September 6); Shostakovich’s No. 3 (September 13), and the series winds up with Tempesta and a new work by Joe Chindamo (September 20).