In it concerts this season at Stockbridge Church -- a
Queen's Hall lookalike in a different part of town, with gentler, more
flattering acoustics -- the Edinburgh Quartet has been combining Nordic
string quartets with Viennese quintets. The mix has proved popular. Even
Sibelius's austere masterpiece in D minor, a work that has never enjoyed
the wide success of his symphonies, was no deterrent when, on Sunday, it
shared the warmer climate of Brahms's Clarinet Quintet.
Though not the most forbidding of his works, Sibelius's Voces Intimae,
as he called it, dates from the sombre period in his life when, under
what he feared to be the threat of throat cancer, he also produced his
Fourth Symphony and his symphonic poem The Bard.
Its odd five-movement structure has led some ensembles to treat it
lopsidedly as a conventional four-movement work preceded by a prelude.
But the Edinburgh Quartet's performance left no doubt that the slow
central movement -- one of Sibelius's most pared down yet most
passionate utterances -- forms the heart of the matter, with the other
movements providing a symmetrical framework. The balance as a result,
was Bartokian, but the intimate voices, sometimes murmuring, sometimes
sharp-edged, were Sibelius's own.
By placing it between early Mozart (the little string quartet, K191)
and late Brahms, the players gave Sibelius's frozen scenery a gilded
framework. With Lawrence Gill, a gifted young member of what is still
the Scottish Opera Orchestra, on clarinet, the Brahms in particular
glowed with a sad serenity that was exactly right.
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