Concert review: Vertavo Quartet

Now marking 40 years since its founding, the Norway-based Vertavo Quartet began with Elizabeth Maconchy’s Third String Quartet (1938), a bold statement from a composer who wrote twelve more in the genre. At scarcely ten minutes, its concentrated utterances are feverish and pulsating, with pizzicatos sounding like heartbeats. The Vertavo’s take seemed perfectly in alignment with Maconchy’s desire to write ‘music as an impassioned argument’.

In the past few years, Ravel’s popular Quartet has both opened and closed concerts, underlining the importance of context in programming. Here it made a luxurious idyll between the impassioned Maconchy and the stormy Britten that followed. The slow movement, marked Très lent, seemed the epicentre of this interpretation, followed by a finale as exuberant as if wood sprites had taken up the players’ instruments.

For the finale, Britten’s Second Quartet, the foursome infused the score with poignant strangeness. In the initial movement, contrasts were heightened between sequences of calm, and those of muscular ferocity. The middle movement was especially striking, like a manic hornpipe danced by ghosts. But the last 20 minutes, honouring Purcell with its title, ‘Chacony: Sostenuto’, must be among the most characteristic of the composer’s style, and the musicians seemed particularly inspired by its vastness. Amid the richness of the variations, each of the connecting cadenzas was a potent reminder that a quartet’s whole is only as good as the individual players.

BRUCE HODGES