We missed a lot of this year’s new-look Bath Festival, unfortunately, but we did manage each to get to a concert by the Vanbrugh Quartet in the Assembly Rooms.
My husband and daughter heard Haydn, Beethoven (Op. 131) and Bartók’s 6th quartet. The Bartók was in fact the second time they’d heard this piece in recent months and I was told that this performance had greater clarity of detail than the other.
I went to hear Zemlinsky and Beethoven’s Op. 132 in a rather thinly-attended concert the following night. I don’t think I’d heard the Zemlinsky quartet (his first) before. It was ‘upbeat’ in more ways than one; as well as being generally sunny in mood, most of the themes began with an anacrusis, or felt as if they did, which became an irritating mannerism after a while.
The Beethoven quartet is my favourite of all his quartets and having got to know it early I would now recognise it instantly from the smallest extract. A problem I had with the performers, shared by others in the audience, was the self-effacing sound of the first violin and more generally a lack of drama about the performances. This was less of a difficulty in the more contrapuntal Heiliger Dankgesang than in the outer movements.