United Kingdom West Meon Music Festival – Brahms, Mendelssohn, Dvořák: Primrose Piano Quartet (Susanne Stanzeleit [violin], Dorothea Vogel [viola], Andrew Fuller [cello], John Thwaites [piano]). St John the Evangelist Church, West Meon, 10.9.2026. (CK)
Brahms – Viola Sonata in F minor
Mendelssohn – Piano Trio in D minor
Dvořák – Piano Quartet in D
West Meon Music Festival has been running for 16 years, but I have only just discovered it, thanks to Laura Rickard, Artistic Director of the Romsey Chamber Music Festival, who was a guest artist in West Meon this year. At the Festival’s heart is the Primrose Piano Quartet, formed in 2004 and named after the great Scottish violist William Primrose, and led by Susanne Stanzeleit.
This year there were eight concerts spread over four days, with an attractively eclectic mix of music. Core classics of the chamber music repertoire rubbed shoulders with Dufay, Byrd and Couperin; Ligeti, Kurtág and Adès; there was a programme of Bridge and his pupil Britten; and works by under-performed composers Ernst von Dohnányi, Frank Martin and Castelnuovo-Tedesco.
I was only able to attend the first and last concerts. Arriving at the Church of St John the Evangelist a few minutes late – West Meon is a village of modest size and takes a bit of finding – it was immediately clear to me as I crept in at the back why the Primrose Piano Quartet had chosen this church as their festival venue. The sound of a single viola, accompanied by piano, soared gently overhead and seemed to reach and warm every corner of the acoustic space.
It was Brahms: one of the results of the late flowering inspired by hearing the clarinettist Mühlfeld, for which he provided an alternative version for viola. Dorothea Vogel spun a gorgeous line in the Andante over John Thwaites’s rippling piano and brought a lovely, burnished sound to the gentle, ländler-like Allegretto grazioso. A splash of piano ushered in the large-scale rondo finale, exuberantly played, and enthusiastically applauded by the audience.
Mendelssohn’s D minor Piano Trio was a delight from start to finish. Andrew Fuller’s cello launched the first movement’s sternly beautiful first theme and its more lyrical second; the music’s agitato character was vividly evoked in playing of energy and fire. Thwaites began the Andante deliciously, in the manner of the Songs without Words; all three players tripped the light fantastic in the puckish Scherzo, and their torrential energy in the finale brought the house down.
The conductor and teacher George Hurst once remarked that if the world listened to more Dvořák it would be a better place. I certainly believe in the therapeutic qualities of his music: its melodic freshness takes us into the open air. So it was here. Suzanne Stanzeleit told us it was the first time the Quartet had played it: yet their performance was wonderfully eloquent and assured. It is only when we compare this with the glorious Op.87 Piano Quartet – which I am sure the Primroses have performed many times, and which I would love to hear them play – that this seems a lesser work, with just a whiff of the study about it.
Mendelssohn was the high point of this concert: but I am so pleased to have heard them play the Dvořák. And perhaps the concert was therapeutic in another way. Autumnal Brahms, mature Mendelssohn, early Dvořák: it seemed, while we listened, that we were all getting younger.
Schubert: James Gilchrist (tenor), John Thwaites (piano), Susanne Stanzeleit, Laura Rickard (violin), Dorothea Vogel (viola), Andrew Fuller, Martin Stanzeleit (cello). St John the Evangelist Church, West Meon, 13.9.2026.
Schubert – Winterreise; String Quintet in C
This unforgettable and probably unrepeatable closing concert was billed as a Schubertiade: but if the word conjures for you (as, until now, it did for me) a select gathering in a cosy bourgeois setting with Biedermeier furniture, dismiss the vision. What we heard was something to which I cannot possibly do justice: Schubert’s last and greatest song-cycle, and his last and greatest chamber musical work. Some, indeed, would consider them the Everest of their respective genres, unsurpassed by any other composer.
I have heard James Gilchrist sing Winterreise before. His performance sounds lived-in, but without losing its edge: I suspect that he journeys further into Schubert’s comfortless world each time he performs it. He brings to it a rich and resonant tenor voice, a limitlessly expressive use of Müller’s text (gesturally as well as vocally), and a concentration which enables him to inhabit each song and to encompass the range of emotion within each of them. He allowed neither himself nor us any break (he did not even have a glass of water); we had no choice but to accompany him for an uninterrupted 70 minutes as the protagonist (in Susanne Stanzeleit’s words) ‘drifts fluidly between the world of his dreams and the bitter reality he faces’.
I made notes on individual songs, but in the face of the performance’s totality, its single curve from Gute Nacht’s abandoned lover to Der Leiermann’s bleak endgame, such commentary would seem an impertinence. (It seems equally impertinent to confine appreciation of John Thwaites’s sensitive accompaniment, deepening and intensifying our experience of each song, to a single sentence.) I will merely say that the pared-back directness and immediacy of Thwaites’s and Gilchrist’s performance threw Müller’s key images into sharp relief: a shadow on the moon, frost whitening dark hair, the beloved’s name carved on a frozen stream with a sharp stone…
There was a long silence before the applause began. A lady sitting near me said quietly, ‘Devastating’.
After a very necessary interval, an intensely vivid performance of Schubert’s great C major Quintet, the three Primrose string players augmented by Laura Rickard and Martin Stanzeleit. They played this wonderful music as if they had just discovered it: there was a lightness and sinuousness to the Allegro’s great theme – nothing too rich or overripe; lots of light and shade. When striving enters the music their playing was wonderfully intense and focused. There was a fierce intensity to the middle section of the Adagio too, in dramatic contrast to the serene spaciousness and weightlessness of the sublime music that surrounds it.
Contrast was to the fore in the Scherzo too, with terrific attack and intense concentration in the main material and mysterious sublimity in the unusual Trio, an expression of quiet grief; the return of the Scherzo music was like coming suddenly out of a tunnel into almost fiercely bright light. In the finale the players caught the note of relentlessness that underlies the music, all the way through its alternations of major and minor to the coda: the shadow that falls at the very end was – in this performance – like a breath of chill air from Winterreise.
Although I missed some wonderful music – I was particularly sorry to miss a peach of a programme which featured the Franck Violin Sonata and the Robert Schumann Piano Quintet along with works by Brahms and Frank Martin – the concerts I heard provided an embarras de richesses. And final thanks to Susanne Stanzeleit whose excellent programme book was full of interesting information around the music, and whose translations of Müller’s poems in Winterreise made reading the English versions a valid and moving experience in itself.
Chris Kettle