As the song says, to begin at the very beginning is a very good place to start, so it seemed entirely right that the Schumann Quartet brought Haydn’s String Quartet in B flat major, Op.1 no.1, to London’s Wigmore Hall to open an evening of intense, invigorating and gloriously fresh music-making.
A couple of years ago, the quartet – Schumann brothers Erik (violin), Ken (violin) and Mark (cello), with violist Liisa Randalu – held a residency at Schloss Esterházy in Eisenstadt, Austria, where Haydn was Kapellmeister and where he developed the string quartet as we know it today. Their suave performance of this early piece, one of the six “divertimenti” that Haydn wrote before he went to Eisenstadt, bore all the hallmarks of long study of the genre by these most technically assured and intuitive musicians. These players care so much about the detail, as in their hushed pizzicato in the first lilting Minuet, or their sensitive shaping of the accompaniment to the long cantabile solo melody of the silky Adagio (superbly handled by Erik Schumann).
From the sunny good nature of the Haydn we found ourselves in the wary, tentative opening pages of Shostakovich’s String Quartet no. 9 in E flat major, each instrument tip-toeing around a restless motif before becoming increasing agitated. A bleak, impassioned Adagio gradually winds into a manic, savage Allegretto before falling back into a second Adagio, intercut with raw interjections that presage the searing, helter-skelter finale with its crazed cello cadenza and hammer-blow pizzicato chords. This was a performance of extraordinary, frightening brilliance – exhausting for both players and audience. “Well, I need a drink after that,” I heard someone behind me say, in stunned admiration.