It had to happen, of course. The centrepiece of this year’s East Neuk Festival has been the late Beethoven quartets played by a top-notch set of visiting players The Elias, Belcea, Pavel Haas and Castalian Quartets shared out the five between them, and it would surely have been a dereliction of duty not to have all four quartets sharing the stage for one concert once their Beethovenian business was (almost) done.
So for the grandest of festival finales, the ENF gathered together 16 of the finest string players in Europe for a showcase of what they can do, including two pieces where all of them played at once, beginning with Sibelius’ Andante festivo.
So what does it sound like when you have four virtuoso quartets playing as one ensemble? Pretty remarkable, as it happens. For one thing, they didn’t sound at all like a conventional string orchestra. Instead everything felt exceptionally clearly communicated – highly charged, almost – with an icy top violin line and an unusually rich, mahogany bass line. Each of the four parts seemed to exist slightly independently of the others, and there was something slightly uncanny about the blend, as though all four parts had been caught in the headlights or underlined with a neon highlighter. The overall effect was like the richest steak or the finest bottle of wine you’d ever had: a treat for the senses, a little bit strange, but also ear-opening in its own way, and completely unique in my experience.
The other piece where they all collaborated was a new one. Sally Beamish wrote Field of Stars specifically for these four quartets, with lots of bespoke touches that were directed at their own distinctive characters. Beamish had the quartets play in their own groups but split around the four corners of the Bowhouse’s hall, the sound switching between diverse pinpricks of sound and blocks of chords coming from four different directions at once. It was interesting to see each of the quartets keeping eye contact across the hall, like the prized communication that chamber music requires but writ large across a much bigger space. The melodies were fragmentary, often with an attractive Celtic lilt, with clever use of quotations. The music might not have had that much more to it than an extended special effect, but it was worth hearing what amounted to a piece of probably unrepeatable site-specific theatre.
One Beethoven quartet remained in the series, and it fell to the Pavel Haas to play Beethoven’s final quartet with soft-toned understatement as befits the most superficially conventional of the late quartets. The finale zipped along with bright good humour, belying any thoughts of Beethoven's “Muss es sein?” being a fundamental question of existence, while the slow movement had a delicate, almost beatific quality, with every phrase carefully delineated and coordinated.
Then the Belcea Quartet and the Castalian Quartet joined forces to end the concert and the festival with a terrifically celebratory performance of Mendelssohn’s evergreen Octet, full of rich, warm waves of sound and shimmering, clear textures. The melodies in the violins rang with cantabile lyricism while there was a special richness to the violas and cellos, particularly gorgeous at the start of the slow movement. Maybe those cellos were a little too exuberant at the start of the finale, where detail was lost in an oaky cloud of semiquavers. Still, this was a fantastically ambitious end to a terrific festival, a jewel in Scotland’s musical year.
