United Kingdom Various, Life & Dance: Fibonacci Quartet (Luna De Mol, Kryštof Kohout [violins], Elliot Kempson [viola], Findlay Spence [cello]). Dora Stoutzker Hall, Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama, Cardiff, 2.5.2025. (GPu)
Haydn – String Quartet No.4, ‘Sunrise’
Schulhoff – Five Pieces for String Quartet
Smetana – String Quartet No.1, ‘From my Life’
The Fibonacci Quartet is an outstanding young string quartet; since their foundation when three members of the quartet were students at London’s Guildhall School of Music (though cellist Findlay Spence joined later), they went on to study with violinist Günter Pichler of the Alban Berg Quartet at the Reina Sofia School of Music in Madrid, and they have won several prestigious prizes. Given that their performance entirely lived up to their high standards throughout this concert, I shall not labour the point in what follows; I shall not repeatedly praise the perfectly controlled and appropriate vehemence of their playing, nor their consummate sense of ensemble, for example. Suffice to say that their music-making enthralled and excited their audience.
I prefer, on this occasion, to concentrate on the high intelligence with which their programme was constructed. It carried the title ‘Life & Dance’, a phrase open to many interpretations, but which unmistakably asserts, by way of metaphor, the symbiotic relationship between living and dancing. To save my elaborating this point I quote two of my favourite statements on dance, both by Albert Einstein: (1) ‘Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper’ and (2) ‘We dance for laughter, we dance for tears, we dance for madness, we dance for fears, we dance for hopes, we dance for screams, we are the dancers, we create the dreams’.
The three works played here by the Fibonacci Quartet were radically different in the use they made of ‘dance’, as different as the lives of the men who composed them. Indeed, I could not help wondering whether where Schulhoff and Smetana were concerned, the programme might have been called ‘Death and Dance’.
Joseph Haydn led a long and relatively straightforward life (especially for the times in which he lived), dying at the age of 77. Erwin Schulhoff’s life, by way of contrast, was, to put it mildly, troubled. The opening of the first movement of Haydn’s ‘Sunrise’ Quartet was played with great sensitivity. The Op.76 quartets formed the last set of quartets which Haydn wrote, being written around the age of 65. No.4 is commonly referred to by the nickname of the ‘Sunrise’. The first movement’s opening – beautifully played by the Fibonacci Quartet – had a hushed sense of expectant reverence, as the first violin (Luna De Mol) rose from some simple chords played by the other three members of the quartet to ‘sing’ a gently aspiring melody. Rarely have I heard this opening played so beautifully. Soon things developed from this aural account of dawn and ‘blazed’ into full sunlight, as it were, the sun rising well above the horizon. The musical materials in the very opening of this first movement (Allegro con spirito) inform what follows. The ensuing Adagio was reverential, a quiet secular hymn, though with an undercurrent of melancholy. Is this a sunset or perhaps more probably an apprehension of the day’s brevity? The delicacy of this second movement was brilliantly transformed in the third movement (Menuetto: Allegro). Though designated a minuet, the courtly French form is soon forgotten as Haydn’s dance in triple meter asserts itself – more rustic than courtly – but still echoing the four-note motif with which the whole work had begun. The last movement (Allegro ma non troppo) opens with what almost sounds like a folk-song, on which Haydn builds several variations, accelerating as the movement hurries towards its close. All of this was played with persuasive conviction and energy by the Fibonaccis.
As a young composer Schulhoff was interested in jazz. He became, by all accounts, a pretty decent jazz pianist. He was also fascinated by his friend Alois Hába’s ideas on microtonal music. He studied composition in Prague, Vienna, Leipzig and Cologne. He was attracted by Dadaism and collaborated on a ballet (which was never completed) with the Dada poet, performer and artist Tristan Tzara. He served in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I, being wounded and becoming an Italian Prisoner of War. He made his way to Prague around 1929, but when the Nazi armies took over the city ten years later, Schulhoff’s Jewish background, along with his well-known enthusiasm for communism made him an obvious suspect. He was arrested and died in the Wulzburg concentration camp in Bavaria in the August of 1942, aged 48. His was far from the long and stable life of Haydn, and this was naturally reflected in his music.
Schulhoff’s Five Pieces for String Quartet could scarcely be more different from the Haydn quartet which preceded it. The five pieces making up Schulhoff’s suite of dances (Viennese Waltz, Serenade, Czech folk music, Tango and Tarantella) echo the sequence of tempos often encountered in Baroque dance suites, fast – slow – fast – slow- fast) but that resemblance is only superficial. The first movement is no real waltz, being in four-four rather than ¾ and abounding in sharp rhythms and abrupt changes of tempo. The second piece seems almost wholly parodic or ironic. There is little or nothing that is serenade-like in this piece. Schulhoff treats the folk dances of his native land with slightly more respect, although their rhythms are driven almost to destruction. This performance offered a wry account of the popular Latin rhythms of the dance halls of the 1920s and the closing piece had insistent, almost violent, rhythms and was redolent of the hypnotic qualities attributed to the original Tarantella dance, as well, perhaps to the illness which the bite of the tarantula was believed to initiate. The work of the Fibonaccis here sounded almost like an elemental force of nature.
Smetana’s First String Quartet closed the programme. Kryštof Kohout took the role of first violin in this quartet, as he had in the set of pieces by Schulhoff; Luna De Mol having filled that position in the Haydn quartet which opened the programme. This remarkable work is, in effect, a brief musical autobiography, as indicated by its subtitle ‘From my Life’. Rather like Schulhoff’s, Smetana’s was a life full of tragedy and ill-luck, though more so in his personal life than because of political events. David Truslove’s programme note on this quartet opened thus: ‘Artistic achievement transcending personal tragedy is amply evident in the Czech composer Bedřich Smetana who buried his first wife and three infant children [within ten years], endured an embittered second marriage and suffered the gradual loss of his hearing before dying in an asylum.’ (He may also have suffered from syphilis.) Smetana’s own notes on this quartet, make clear its relevance to the events of his life. He wrote that ‘the first movement depicts my youthful leanings towards art, the inexpressible yearning for something I could neither express nor define’. That sense of idealised yearning was beautifully articulated by the Fibonaccis. He also tells us that the second movement (Allegro moderato à la Polka) ‘is a quasi-polka which recalls the joyful days of my youth when I composed dance tunes and was widely known as a passionate lover of dancing’. Here the Fibonaccis found, quite precisely, the appropriate sense of joy remembered, but fused with the simultaneous awareness of its loss. The overall mood is not radically different in the third movement (Largo sostenuto) which, in the composer’s own words: ‘reminds me of the happiness of my first love, the girl who became my first wife’. The fourth movement (Vivace) was memorable, as it should be, for the penetrating sound of the lengthily sustained E natural, of which the composer wrote that ‘the long persistent note in the finale owes its origin to … the fateful ringing of the high-pitched tone in my ears, which, in 1874, announced the beginning of my deafness [Smetana was completely deaf by the October of that year]. I allowed myself this small joke, though it was ultimately disastrous’.ehe
This was a technically superb performance, which delineated every twist and turn of this remarkable quartet, with its remembrances of youthful yearning, first love and the death of object of that love; its tenderness – and the horror at the onset of deafness.
This concert by the Fibonacci Quartet was amongst the very best performances by a string quartet that I have been fortunate enough to hear.
Glyn Pursglove