Brodowski Quartet is Hereford Concert Society choice for The Courtyard

1:51pm Thursday 13th November 2008

FORMED only three years ago, the British-based Brodowski Quartet has already won several important international prizes and the Hereford Concert Society performance at The Courtyard showed why.

The four young string players are highly talented and played their imaginative programme with a maturity that belied their youth.

It opened with the fascinating Quartet No.1 of 1924 by the Czech-born Jewish composer Erwin Schulhoff, who enjoyed a short but successful career in his homeland until the Nazis took over and declared his music “degenerate”. He died in a concentration camp.

Far from being degenerate, the work is a highly inventive and enthralling compendium of technically taxing ‘extended’ string techniques.

Whispering harmonics, shimmering tremolandos and unearthly sounds played ‘sul ponticello’ (on the bridge) are combined with rumbustious folk-dance rhythms in a display of dazzling virtuosity.

Following this, the more familiar language of Haydn’s C minor Quartet (The Bird) might have been an anti- climax, but the Brodowskis’ success at capturing Haydn’s ever-knowing wit ensured that Papa’s wily mastery shone through.

The second half of the concert was devoted to Mendelssohn’s F minor Quartet, Opus 80. Written following the death of his sister Fanny, it is a work of searing, almost unrelenting intensity.

The players caught the mood affectingly and were fully up to the work’s prodigious technical demands.

The well-deserved encore was an hilarious item from Hindemith’s Minimax suite, which pits twittering birdsong against the vulgar oom-pah of a German military march.

Yet another splendid evening, courtesy of the HCS.

– John Rushby-Smith