Who would have thought that an evening shadowed by the figure of Death could draw the crowds? This excellent concert by the Dudok Quartet Amsterdam, performed in Sheffield under the auspices of Music in the Round, gave the definitive lie to any worries that such an event might have been unduly melancholy, in the process triumphantly confirming that it’s almost impossible to explore the theme of death without also considering ideas of love, life and memory.
It helped that the major work – the one that no doubt attracted many in the audience – was Schubert’s String Quartet no. 14 in D minor, “Death and the Maiden”. Its almost unrelenting forward drive and compelling sense of drama have always made it a favourite among Schubert’s chamber works, and if the Dudok’s performance was not the cleanest or tidiest you’ve ever heard, it scored thrillingly in terms of its theatrical exploitation of contrasts of major and minor keys, not to mention the dynamic shifts from hushed tension to full-throated lamentation, especially in the variations of the second movement. The galloping coda to the finale drew cheers and foot-stamping from an audience swept along by the tarantella's urgent close.
A show of hands before the performance revealed that almost all the audience were familiar with the work. Had the same question been asked about the concert opener, Kaija Saariaho’s 2006 work Terra Memoria, I doubt more than a handful would have responded. It’s a work about memory, the memories of the dead that change, hauntingly, in the minds of the living. On a technical level its shifting textures and techniques demand formidable levels of skill from the performers, and the Dudok Quartet appeared to make light work of the trills, tremolos and glissandos, the variations in bowing technique and the constantly shifting dynamics of its rapidly vacillating moods. Perhaps the best proof that such relatively challenging music can nevertheless compel an audience’s attention was that the piece was heard in rapt silence throughout.
Between these two very different pieces, the Dudok Quartet brought their own arrangements of works by three composers who wrote nothing for the string quartet medium. Yet, in their different ways, works by Gesualdo, Mussorgsky and Liszt not only offered several different angles on the theme of death, they also confirmed that this music can narrate compellingly without the necessity of hearing the words that the composers originally set. Gesualdo’s Moro, lasso, al mio diolo from his Sixth Book of Madrigals, setting the clichéd Renaissance depiction of the tortured lover, slid with deliciously chromatic anguish in this arrangement. It led without a break into an arrangement of the first of the Mussorgsky Songs and Dances of Death, in which the panic of the mother of the dying child on first violin is answered by the deliberate inevitability of the voice of Death on the viola. Finally, the penultimate section of Liszt’s Via Crucis, in which the body of Christ is taken down from the cross before being placed in the tomb, depicted with great intensity the pathos of death and the tenderness of love. This triptych showed the Dudok Quartet not just stretching the boundaries of the quartet repertoire but compelling us to listen to old music with fresh ears.
