This Sheffield concert by the excellent Piatti Quartet raised more questions than it answered about the relationship between music and film, but it provided considerable food for thought, not to mention the hugely impressive performances. Of the four works programmed, the first three were initially composed as film soundtracks. The final work – Ravel’s luminous quartet – entered the core repertoire long before film-makers, most notably Wes Anderson in The Royal Tenenbaums, chose it to accompany their movies.
Ravel’s quartet is ‘pure music’, but what of the others? Can we listen to them ‘blind’, or ‘unsee’ the cinematic images which the music accompanies? And does it make any difference to how we hear this music if we have never seen the films in question? If the answer to these questions is a resounding ‘perhaps’, the concert at least offered, in the absence of any moving images, a chance to put the focus exclusively on the music.
The opening work was Richard Birchall’s short suite from Bernard Herrmann’s score to Psycho. Unless one has been avoiding 20th-century culture entirely, the screeching violins immediately bring to mind Hitchcock’s famous shower scene, but putting this section in its wider musical context enabled the Piattis to foreground the unnerving sense of claustrophobia that Herrmann’s music evokes. The music to the opening credits took its inspiration from Bartók, and the score then moves by way of Stravinsky to end up sounding very like Shostakovich, right down to the echo of the latter’s D-S-C-H motto. That may suggest Herrmann’s work is derivative, but what emerged from the quartet’s sure-footed performance was the way it trod a persuasive path between psychological unease and abject terror.
After the brief appearance of Jonny Greenwood’s The Prospector’s Quartet, drawn from There Will Be Blood, with its sombre, mechanical cello notes, over which the other strings churn bleakly, the main work in the first half was Philip Glass’ String Quartet no. 3. Linking all three works was a sense of pulse, heart-poundingly human in Herrmann, evocative of machinery in Greenwood, and in the Glass quartet, the arpeggiated patterns and shifting chords which are the composer’s familiar musical fingerprints. Originally part of the score to Paul Schrader’s Mishima, Glass extracted six movements for this concert piece. It eschews the expected ideas of a quartet’s musical development, replacing them with slowly shifting layers of material, mostly melancholic, moderate in tempo, employing a narrow expressive range. The Piattis gave a performance of intense focus, alert to the minutely nuanced changes in timbre and rhythm. The movement titles, unhitched from the film, suggested little in relation to what we heard in performance, like looking at an artefact from six slightly different angles.
After the interval, the Ravel String Quartet in F major was like moving from black-and-white to colour, and the Piattis made the most of its vividly kaleidoscopic shimmering texture. It’s hard to imagine a finer performance, spikily percussive in the pizzicato-led second movement, then silkily dreamy in the slow-breathed third. It seems invidious to highlight any one performer in an ensemble of such accomplishment, but viola player Miguel Sobrinho was mesmeric.
There was an opportunity for one (entirely non-film related) encore, the Cantilena from Joseph Phibbs’ String Quartet no. 4, written for the Piatti Quartet. It felt like nothing so much as a late Beethoven slow movement in 21st-century guise, crowning a concert of rich variety.
