Carducci String Quartet
St John’s Priory, Kilkenny
★★★☆☆
The Carducci String Quartet, who made their Kilkenny Arts Festival debut in 2007, and gave a complete cycle of Shostakovich’s quartets for the festival last year, are back again this year for a set of four mixed-bag programmes.
Each of their lunchtime concerts has what feels like a tacked-on title; they opened on Sunday with “The Student Becomes the Master”. This was a chalk-and-cheese pairing of works by Haydn and Beethoven.
They offered Haydn in jocose mode, in the Quartet in E flat, Op 33 No 2, nicknamed the “Joke”. And they showed how Beethoven’s Quartet in E minor, Op 59 No 2, brings a new gravitas, breadth and scale to a genre that was barely 50 years old at the time of its completion, in 1806, an astonishing addition to a genre that had already thrown up a slew of masterpieces that fascinate performers and listeners to this day.
Think of the number of peaks in the repertoire of the piano quartet or quintet (which also came into being in the late 18th century), of the saxophone (invented in the middle of the 19th century) or of electronics (from the middle of the 20th century) and you’ll see what I mean.
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The Carducci perform like broad-stroke generalists rather than the kind of players who get het up about the fine detail that concerns historically informed performers. Yes, they do of course make distinctions between their approaches to Haydn and Beethoven. But common to their performances of both was a tendency towards overemphasis, through accents on the final notes of phrases and motifs and an indulgence in individual expression that made it easy for too much weight to fall on busy writing that was also supporting an individual line.
The players’ fondness for fullness and heartiness of tone, of emphatic expression over clarity, was well evidenced in the Beethoven. It is an often gutsy piece, but this performance was thrusting in ways that obscured the musical argument. On this occasion, the sparer the tonal palette, the more communicative the playing was for me.
In both works the Carducci stepped away from contemporary norms by being light on repeats. The decision may be to do with respecting the duration listeners expect in a lunchtime programme. But it did no favours to either work.
That said, they play with a passion and emotional engagement that the Kilkenny audience clearly appreciated. Their handling of the final movement of the Haydn quartet was a masterclass in theatrical timing and gesture. The work’s nickname comes from the number of judiciously separated false endings that the composer set as a trap for the listener. The Carducci tricked the audience into multiple premature bursts of applause. Haydn would surely have approved.
