United Kingdom Beethoven, Britten, Ravel: Jarualda Quartet (Alex Postlethwaite, David Joyce [violin], Jane Park [viola], Ruth Henley [cello]). Gateway Arts Centre, Shrewsbury, 6.2.2025. (CK)
Beethoven – String Quartet in C minor, Op.18 No.4
Britten – String Quartet No.2 in C major
Ravel – String Quartet in F major
Last September I reported from the Corvedale Festival in Shropshire: a mainstay of the programme of events was the Jarualda Quartet, formed by professional string players who live locally. (Their name is ingeniously constructed from the first two letters of the first name of each player). It was very good to return to Shropshire to renew friendships and to hear the quartet in action again, this time in Shrewsbury.
The Gateway Arts and Education Centre is clearly a great asset to the town. The hall in which the concert took place was rather like a very large classroom, but with the seating arranged in a semicircle it proved to be a good venue for music. Distance, so they say, lends enchantment: the Jarualdas are utterly committed and passionately physical players, and there was no distance here to soften the impact of their playing. Here was no genteel soirée of tasteful after-dinner music-making to tickle the ear: it sounds absurd to speak of chamber music red in tooth and claw, but that is what we got – thrilling performances, almost as taxing and exhausting for the audience as they must have been for the players.
Beethoven’s Op.18 String Quartets are early works, but there is nothing lightweight about them – certainly not about No.4, in arguably the composer’s most powerful key, C minor (he had already written the Pathétique Sonata in that key). It has been described as the most passionate of the set of six. The performance from the Jarualdas was one of startling intensity – the first movement’s melody repeatedly undercut by rasping sforzandos, and the insistent quaver rhythm giving an unnerving impression of a clock that is running much too fast. This ‘driven’ quality persists beneath the well-mannered charm of the Andante and resurfaces forcefully in the Menuetto and finale. There is no slow movement to offer conventional relief, and no escape from the minor mode as the finale finds its quietus in three more brutal sforzandos. I think we were all rather stunned: it was perhaps as well that I was unaware of what was in store for us next.
I had never heard Britten’s String Quartet No.2. I have tended to blow hot and cold about Britten’s music, sometimes coming dangerously close to Colin Davis’s assertion that he wrote one masterpiece (Peter Grimes). Last BBC Proms season I heard a magnificent performance of the War Requiem under Antonio Pappano which left me admiring but completely unmoved. It would be melodramatic of me to describe this experience provided by the Jarualdas, led by Alex Postlethwaite’s tirelessly committed first violin, as a Damascus moment: but there was something of that quality about it, at least in my case. It left me lost for words: I shall not attempt to describe the imaginative breadth of the first movement or the Shostakovich-like edginess of the Scherzo, let alone the cumulatively overwhelming Purcell-inspired 20-minute Chacony that crowns the work. I shall merely recall my brother’s reaction (which I have quoted once before) as we came out of a performance of one of Hans Werner Henze’s orchestral works – ‘I feel as if someone has put a wooden spoon into my subconscious and given it a vigorous stir’.
After the interval – a period of recovery after an hour or so of music demanding much of players and audience alike – Ravel’s only string quartet, entertainingly introduced by Postlethwaite (it was a shame that he didn’t have time to explain how it is utterly unlike Debussy’s, with which it is so often coupled). Perhaps it is worth noticing that all three works in this concert were written when their composers were young – though already at the halfway mark of Beethoven’s and Britten’s lives, and not far short of Ravel’s.
The airy, flowing opening movement was a delight, with foretastes of Ravel’s wonderful ear for melody and harmony; there were moments when I found myself thinking, no wonder Vaughan Williams went to study with him. The slow central section of the Scherzo, the soft centre of a pizzicato outer shell, seemed to create a soundworld of its own. Lovely sounds in the extended, meditative slow movement too, with eloquent playing from Ruth Henley’s cello at its core. The furious opening of the finale brought playing as thrillingly physical and kaleidoscopic as anything in the Britten.
Having previously heard the Jarualdas play in the warm ecclesiastical acoustic of St Michael’s Church, Munslow there was something up-close, no-holds-barred about these performances that was thrilling indeed. There was beauty too, plenty of it, but the sheer physical and emotional commitment that goes into music-making as fearless and intense as this is what I will chiefly remember. Magnificent!
Chris Kettle