Quartet in A K464 - Mozart

Off the Wall - Michael Alcorn

Quartet No 1 in D - Tchaikovsky

The New Helsinki String Quartet's tour of Ireland ended last Wednesday night in the Coach House, Dublin Castle. The programme included a new work composed for this tour by Michael Alcorn, and commissioned by the organisers, Music Network. For players and composer alike, a 10-concert tour offers an unusual opportunity for repeated performance and improvement, and in this concert at least, Alcorn's demanding piece came across with an authority one does not readily find in the playing of new works.

Off the Wall is inspired by the large-scale urban graffiti often seen on city walls, and the composer rightly described it as a roller-coaster experience. It opens with high-pitched, fortissimo scrubbing on note clusters, and moves on to discourse between the instruments, still using the extremes of playing technique. In just under 10 minutes, there are distorted recurrences, like the looping variations of spray-painted graffiti, while the working out and the playing had a persistent, high-octane drive which held one's attention.

This was a compelling performance, and far more persuasive than that of Mozart's Quartet in A K464, which opened the concert. There, the Helsinkis seemed to be aiming for refinement, and while there was some over-projected detail, their playing was always impressive in its control of colour. But it was also so refined that this music's natural strength was gone.

There were no such problems in the final work, Tchaikovsky's Quartet No. 1 in D. The slow movement was breathtaking in its beauty, and the players showed equal mastery in the concentrated, almost symphonic writing of the outer movements. Here, as in the Alcorn, the playing's spontaneity hid the mastery of technique and understanding which made it possible.