Quatuor Terpsycordes

Coach House, Dublin Castle

Mozart –

Quartet in G K156.

Brahms –

Quartet in A minor Op 51 No 2.

Deirdre McKay –

Case studies

. Henri Dutilleux –

Ainsi la nuit

Tuesday’s Dublin leg of Geneva-based Quatuor Terpsycordes’s Music Network tour was a classic instance of a concert of two halves.

The programme offered a work from each of the four centuries during which string quartets have been written. But the choices didn’t add up to a survey of repertoire peaks, or seem designed to present any significant developmental narrative. The sequence was more of a lucky dip affair, sampling the 1770s, the 1870s and the 1970s, and rounding off with a piece from the 21st century. Youthful Mozart can be wonderful, and there is a freshness in his G major Quartet of 1772 that’s not always to be found in his early quartets. However, this would have been hard to divine from the Terpsycordes’s strange approach. They dampened the spirits of the opening Presto, laboured over the central slow movement, and tried to force too much out of the closing Minuet.

The Quartet in A minor that Brahms wrote in 1873 was heavy going, too, with the intricacies of the writing often made to sound unnecessarily dense and awkward.

After the interval, however, the Terpsycordes were like a different group.

Deirdre McKay’s 2004

Case studies

and Henri Dutilleux’s 1976

Ainsi la nuit

are both studies in quartet sonority.

Case studies

was commissioned for young players, and McKay set out to please musicians and listeners of any age, bringing unconventional techniques and foreign objects to bear on the instruments, to produce a range of sometimes African-sounding effects.

Dutilleux’s quartet has a title, but that title, and the titles of the internal sections, came to the composer only as he was finishing the piece.

The music’s crepuscular flurries, glinting shards and miniature explosions, often conveying the atmosphere of a confused memory, were presented with a flavour of authenticity that was to be felt also in the McKay, but which had been singularly lacking in the works by Mozart and Brahms.

On tour until Saturday