ASQ launch season with cutting edge program
THE Australian String Quartet launched its new season with some trademark tight and seamless ensemble work and music with a cutting edge.
Wentworth Courier
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I HAVE been following the Adelaide-based Australian String Quartet for about 14 years in their various guises and the more I see their present line-up of violinists Dale Barltrop and Francesca Hiew, violist Stephen King and cellist Sharon Grigoryan the more impressed I become.
The ensemble traditionally has always mixed the standard chamber repertoire with cutting edge new works, and then there is that glorious tone of their four instruments made by 18th century master luthier Giovanni Battista Guadagnini.
But the current line-up has a certain edge. Their ensemble work is tight and seamless. Barltrop has a sweet tone and unerring fingers and a feature is to watch with delight as Hiew, King and Grigoryan fire off him and each other.
They launched their third season with a program that could truly be called a night of two halves.
PULSING
It started with the houselights down and Philip Glass’s String Quartet No 3, Mishima, which was composed as a soundtrack to a film about the right-wing Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima who staged a failed coup attempt in 1970 and committed ritual suicide.
In six sections, all of them with Glass’s trademark repetitive chord sequences and pulsing rhythms, the work led without break into the second piece, Australian composer Brett Dean’s String Quartet No. 1, Eclipse, written in 2003 as a reaction to the Tampa controversy two years earlier and how it polarised political and public opinion at the time.
The backstory to Glass’s piece could have been about anything, which is maybe why his work is much more enjoyable when there is a visual element involved
Introducing the program cellist Grigoryan said the Glass made “the perfect prelude” to Dean’s work, and the segue was indeed smooth, although there was an interesting contrast between Glass’s minimalism — which for this listener is ideal music to have on while you’re doing something else — and Dean’s razor-sharp individualistic and sometimes confrontational approach to his subject matter.
The backstory to Glass’s piece could have been about anything, which is maybe why his work is much more enjoyable when there is a visual element involved. Dean’s music is much more immediate and relevant — you actually feel the anguish of the refugees rescued at sea by the Norwegian freighter captain and their growing desperation and anger as the Howard government refused them entry to Australia.
The work, which the ASQ performed in its 2009 season, is one movement divided into three parts, starting with an ominous slow section with Grigoryan’s cello prominent, but gradually building to a disturbing climax of plucked figures before subsiding again.
POWERFUL
The second section is an edgy, quick movement with unexpected changes of rhythm and spiky accents before the epilogue finally brings some serenity, fading away with the feeling that nothing has been resolved.
It’s powerful stuff and Barltrop and his troops handled it superbly. It’s harder to play softly than loudly, and their bow control and precision in the long “fade” which ended the piece was impressive.
After interval it was all sunshine and blue skies with the opening movement of Mendelssohn’s String quartet in D major Op 44 No. 1 — one of the most joyful openings in the canon and no doubt his reaction to his wife’s recovery after the difficult birth of their first baby.
The work becomes more restrained and reflective in the lovely two middle movements before it all ends radiantly with its irrepressible final movement, bringing the concert to happy close and the ASQ’s new season to a triumphant start.
DETAILS
● CONCERT: Australian String Quartet
● WHEN: Monday, February 13
● WHERE: City Recital Hall Angel Place