One of the goals dear to those who plan the annual Bradfield Festival of Music is to give a platform to emerging musical talent. This recital by the Woolf Quartet, current Learning and Participation Ensemble Fellows at Wigmore Hall, successfully revealed four young musicians, barely into their infancy as a quartet, embracing established chamber music repertoire with the sort of fearlessness that shows that taking risks brings its own rewards. Yes, in the future some of the raw edges in their readings of major works by Mendelssohn, Shostakovich and Debussy will get smoothed off and their interpretations will no doubt deepen, but for now this feels like an ensemble with talent to burn and the confidence that comes from knowing it.
Their programme was impressively diverse, beginning with Webern’s early Langsamer Satz, a slow movement of tenderness and yearning. In their hands its youthful ardour, the shifting moods of desire, inner turmoil and glimpsed tranquillity, came across with direct intensity, as though to say, ‘this is what it’s like to fall in love’. The teenage Mendelssohn was even younger when he produced his String Quartet no. 2 in A minor, but here too love was the prompt, the music growing from his earlier song Frage. The Woolfs fared better in the music’s less cluttered sections: the tenderly romantic slow movement, at least until the austere fugal passage intervenes, and the graceful third movement Intermezzo, nodding in the direction of the classical minuet. But they were absolutely on point when it came to the quartet’s close, its downbeat resolution taking us back to the work’s opening and refusing us the simple satisfaction of a ‘happy ending’.
The second half of the concert was bookended by two major works for string quartet. Of the two, Shostakovich’s String Quartet no. 7 in F sharp minor felt, in the Woolf Quartet’s hands, marginally the more fully achieved, even though it is stalked by moods of desolation and despair at the pitilessness of death, which might (if one can escape accusations of ageism) seem less intimately part of the lives such young players. Shostakovich’s music is remarkable – language of deceptive simplicity capable of plumbing the depths of human experience – and the Woolfs had the full measure of its range, from the nervous twitches of its opening Allegretto, via the eerie haunting of the slow movement, to the wild anger and ferocity of the finale, that gives way in its turn to the shadowy collapse of its final bars.
Interestingly, the only work in their programme that has a definitive ‘ending’ (as opposed to vanishing into silence), the Debussy quartet that closed their programme was possibly the least fully achieved of the works they played; a beautiful, mellifluous reading, impeccably precise, but just missing that mysterious shimmering quality that may well come when the quartet has been playing this music for a few more years.
No Woolf Quartet concert would be complete without contemporary music. Here we got Anna Meredith’s Honeyed Words, in an arrangement for quartet rather than the cello-and-electronics version on Meredith’s album Varmints. The Woolfs played it as a languid, slightly queasy dance. We also heard a new work, Seed, by the quartet’s leader, the multi-talented Zosia Herlihy-O’Brien, which she described as being about the growth and genesis of new ideas. From its opening debt to Britten’s Simple Symphony, it reached for the wide-open spaces of the natural world. If I said it might soundtrack a clip from a David Attenborough nature documentary, I mean that in the best possible sense – music both alive and growing.
