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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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<\/i> than in the outer movements.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … Continue reading