United Kingdom Maxwell Davies, R. Schubert, Pärt, Schumann, Folk Songs: Cordelia Williams (piano), Maxwell Quartet (Colin Scobie, George Smith [violins], Elliott Perks [viola], Duncan Strachan [cello]). Turner Sims Concert Hall, Southampton, 15.5.2025. (CK)
Maxwell Davies – Farewell to Stromness
Schubert – Notturno in E-flat
Pärt – Fratres
R. Schumann – Piano Quintet in E-flat, Op.44
(Interspersed with folk song arrangements)
Within a fortnight of Sean Shibe’s recital at the Turner Sims we were visited by another young, innovative, collaborative and cross-cultural musician, the pianist Cordelia Williams. In this, the second of three concerts here, her partners were the Maxwell Quartet, who have made a name for themselves by pairing the chamber music repertoire with the folk music of their native Scotland.
Williams is interested in the links between individuality and community: the inspiration for the programme she had devised came from a poetic fragment – in sleep the world breathes/through your body/in and out, out and in – which suggests that we are all connected by the very act of breathing. And indeed, the beginning of Schubert’s Notturno in E-flat does sound like breathing: violin (Colin Scobie) and cello (Duncan Strachan) pulsing gently against the rippling, harp-like undulations of the piano (it also has kinship with the wonderful Adagio of the C major String Quintet). I also liked Williams’s suggestion that the blithe little figure on the piano near the end is ‘the appearance of the first birdsong’: as if Schubert, confronted by illness and death, finds composure and consolation in the imagining of a prelapsarian Eden. Always good when one is invited to hear a piece of music with fresh ears.
Chamber music enacts and affirms the connections between individual and community: and there is no need for me to emphasise the role and importance of folk music in this regard. The Maxwells opened the first half with a touching eighteenth-century boating song, Fear a Bhata, on the universal theme of a woman yearning for her lover to return from the sea: a sad and beautiful arrangement beginning with the first violin keening against rocking open fifths on the viola. They followed it with a lively Shetland Jig (‘Da Full Rigged Ship’) and Reel (‘Da New Rigged Ship’). They closed the first half with their arrangements of an eighteenth-century Strathspey (‘Master Francis Sitwell’), a Slip Jig (’The Marquis of Tullibardine’) and a Reel (‘Miss Cameron of Balvenie’) from the North-East of Scotland. The Reel – as infectious as a Hornpipe – sent us into the interval in high good humour.
Between these folksong sets The Maxwells also gave us a version for string quartet of Arvo Pärt’s Fratres (in an entertaining introduction Duncan Strachan told us that the piece exists in at least 17 versions). Perhaps because I am used to a version for string orchestra, I at first found their ghostly chiming thin and insubstantial rather than austerely beautiful: but the concentration of their playing was most impressive. The changes were rung by pizzicato cello (in the version I have, claves and a soft bass drum are used): the cello’s quiet thrums, regular but widely spaced, suggested to me the occasional passing of a lighthouse beam.
Williams herself contributed two piano solos: the first, Peter Maxwell Davies’s ubiquitous Farewell to Stromness, was a little short on poetry: but it was enough to send me in memory to the stern of the MV Hamnavoe, watching Stromness slowly recede behind its wake; and to reflect that my own years of living in Orkney are likewise receding into the past. The second was her own arrangement of Shetland’s oldest surviving song, the Unst Boat Song: a rich and extended arrangement, a rippling left hand keeping us at sea, the song rising to a nobly Schubertian chordal treatment; and with an amplitude that found room for folksong guest appearances (Scarborough Fair included).
After the interval, pianist and quartet combined for Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet. They attacked it with joyous energy, their playing full of light and shade and character: the heavenly second theme arrived on Duncan Strachan’s cello with complete naturalness, and Cordelia Williams eased beautifully into the more reflective passages. Generous, flexible playing: irresistible. The second movement’s march sounded stealthy, sinister, but the first episode (in C major) had a lovely flow. After the passionate second episode the first violin’s theme – based on a two-note falling figure – suggested the possibility of benediction until the march quietly insisted on having the last word (almost). Williams shone with some fiery playing in the Scherzo, and the ‘gypsy’ character of the second Trio was projected with real flair. The finale was splendidly emphatic, the fugal coda anchored and driven by Williams’s gleefully vigorous left hand.
The concert as a whole left, perhaps inevitably, a mixed impression: it would have been interesting to hold an exit poll asking audience members which piece they had most enjoyed – excluding, perhaps, the Schumann.
Chris Kettle