Friday 27th June

The well travelled Marmen Quartet stop off between concerts in Connecticut (USA) and Cork (Ireland) to perform for us in Bradfield.

Haydn’s D major quartet is the last of 6 in the Op 33 set all written in 1781 and dedicated to Grand Duke Paul of Russia. Maintaining the “Papa Haydn” perspective, the first movement of this quartet was later used by Mozart in his K458 quartet (“The Hunt”). This quartet is not as often performed as No. 2 “The Joke”, though it does have Haydn’s sense of humour, or No. 3 “The Bird”, though there are similar lyrical ideas here, especially in the third movement.

Dating from 1903, the Ravel String Quartet has become a chamber classic. Ravel dedicated this work to Gabriel Fauré. and based its structure on Debussy’s string quartet of 1893. For both composers, each composed only one string quartet. The colours painted in the Ravel quartet are strong and rich in contrast and shows a greater freedom than one might otherwise associate with this composer. Nevertheless, it has a familiar sequence of themes that recur throughout the work’s traditional 4 movement structure. The opening Allegro sets a lyrical tone, the second movement more lively, with cycles of lyrical and brighter pizzicato thematic material leading to a declarative conclusion. Some of the lyrical ideas from the first movement can be heard in the slow and somewhat unsettling third movement. The work finishes with a very lively fourth movement, again, referring to the lyrical material from the first movement with a completely different tone colour.

With a nickname deriving from the unusual juxtaposition of musical lines in the first movement, Mozart’s K 465 String Quartet in C major is the last of a set of 6 dedicated to Haydn and dates from 1785. The dissonant instrumental entries and unusual lines that permeate the whole of the first movement and that form the starting points for the remaining movements have led to this quartet being heavily analysed by musicologists, and frequently played by ensembles seeking out something a little controversial. However, over time, the originality of this work has been appreciated more than its contended structure and is now a familiar piece of the chamber repertoire.