Zehetmair Quartet, Wigmore Hall, review

By Ivan Hewett 624PM GMT seventeen March 2010

There are couple of fibre quartets I would gamble I could mark in a blind test, but the Zehetmair Quartet is one. Its not an suave receptive to advice they make, but it is positively hyper-alert, each word and each textural item weighed and scrubbed purify of routine.

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Combined with their coming all in black, with no song stands (the party plays from memory) that receptive to advice tells you youre in for something serious.

That peculiarity was generally clear in Mozarts slim G-major quartet, created when the composer was usually 16. So most of the song consists of beautifully incited poetic clichs laid finish to end, but they were so vividly characterised by the players that they seemed pithy and interesting.

After the Mozart came something honestly dense, the 2nd party by the good Swiss oboist and composer Heinz Holliger. Its 6 movements all elicit a opposite kind of texture, together with a grand French Overture evoking Gothic frescoes of angels, a chorale and a shimmering emergence chorus. All of that sounds charmingly picturesque, but unfortunately each thought was elaborated with such stubborn insistence, and such endless microtonal dissonance, that appeal was shortly banished.

However the last transformation brought a brilliantly talented cadence a postulated chorale phony with speechless humming from the players. The initial time I listened this supernatural and radiant receptive to advice was when the party played the square in 2008, and on that arise it done the eager bleakness of the preceding movements appear worthwhile. This time I wasnt so sure.

Finally came Beethovens last quartet, a square that needs no assistance to appear mysterious. It is galumphing and ultra-refined, tenderly regretful and otherworldly, barren and brusquely cheerful, all at once. Most quartets belligerent this accumulation in a elementary position of relaxed simplicity, but not the Zehetmairs. They found an additional covering of strangeness, over the ones Beethoven had put there.

The initial movement, done of pertly elementary phrases similar to a comic show scene, here had an additional vividness that done the impudence somewhat surreal. The barren key to the last transformation was slower than usual, and since a bizarre milling sound, similar to someone panting for breath. It was striking, but as well most so, similar to a really abounding salsa layered on something that already has a clever essence of the own. With this piece, being elementary and candid is the most appropriate approach to exhibit the depths.