It was a conversation between Edward Elgar and his publisher August Jaeger about Beethoven’s slow movements that led to Nimrod in the Enigma Variations. We know that they talked about the Pathétique Sonata, suggested in that variation’s hushed opening bars, but I wonder what they would have had to say about last night’s Wigmore Hall recital, where the slow movements from Beethoven’s First Razumovsky Quartet (Op.59 no.1) and the epic Op.130 were the highlights of the Quatuor Ébène’s programme.
The Ébènes are distinguished Beethovenians, with several cycles and a recording under their belts, but their current round of cycles – in London, Tokyo, Rome, Paris and Berlin – are the first with cellist Yuya Okamoto, appointed in 2024 following the departure of the long-serving Raphaël Merlin. With his singing tone and springy, rhythmic impulse, he seems a fine fit alongside the silky violins of Pierre Colombet and Gabriel Le Magadure and Marie Chilemme’s buttery viola. All four seem to breathe as one.
The most expansive of the three middle-period masterpieces commissioned by Count Andrey Razumovsky, Russia's ambassador to Vienna, the F major quartet is unusual in that all four of its movements are in sonata form. Okamoto propelled the buoyant opening Allegro in busy fashion, while the quick wit of the “sempre scherzando” second movement had an almost caustic bite.
On one surviving sketch of the slow movement, marked Adagio e molto mesto (slow and very sad), Beethoven wrote “A weeping willow or an acacia tree on my brother’s grave”: possibly a masonic reference (the acacia was a symbol of Freemasonry) or a reference to a brother, born the year before Ludwig, but who lived only one week. It is one of Beethoven’s most ethereal slow movements, desolate, mournful music, and the Ébènes dug deeply into its grief. The second theme’s pizzicatos fell like raindrops before Colombet’s molto cantabile phrases briefly parted the clouds. The finale was dispatched ebulliently, a shrug and a sway clearly evident, its Russian folk theme a nod to Beethoven’s patron.
It was another Russian noble, Prince Nikolai Galitzin, who commissioned the six-movement String Quartet no. 13 in B flat major, performed after the interval with its original Große Fuge finale which so confounded listeners at its 1826 premiere that Beethoven succumbed to pressure from his publisher to write a new one. In true late Beethovenian fashion, the music often scowls, less conversational than argumentative. The Ébènes were in combative form, especially in the fierce interruption to the miniature Presto, although the Alla danza tedesca was all sweetness and light, despite a few uncharacteristic intonation slips.
Of the two slow movements, the Andante con moto tripped along gracefully, but it was the sublime Cavatina that stood out, Colombet singing out the expressive first violin aria with its aching lines, the profound middle section performed with dignified restraint. What might Elgar and Jaeger have made of such noble playing? The Große Fuge then shattered that tranquility, a mighty confrontation, the quartet relishing its jagged themes before clarity and coherence was finally restored.
