RTE Vanbrugh String Quartet

{TABLE} Quartet in B flat K589 .......... Mozart String Quartet (1996) ........... Eric Sweeney Quintet in G min K516 ........... Mozart {/TABLE} THE RTE Vanbrugh String Quartet continued its series built around Mozart's quartets and quintets with a fine concert at the National Concert Hall on Sunday afternoon.

The Vanbrughs encourage the composition and performance of quartets by modern Irish composers. So RTE commissioned the String Quartet (1996) from Eric Sweeney, and this concert included the first performance.

Like much of Sweeney's recent music, this four-movement work uses techniques, developed from minimalism. These include fluctuating ostinatos and textures built of overlapping small motifs, which can expand by the addition of notes and by varied repetitions, such as a change in the order of notes.

Such techniques have inherent limitations. In particular, the small-scale repetitions - which usually have a quasi-tonal character - can generate only small-scale progression. While Sweeney's quartet has many well-crafted features, it only intermittently surmounts the rather static consequences of these techniques.

A few composers can make these limitations seem like virtues. John Adams and Steve Reich, for example, include progressions which operate on a much larger scale, so that minimalism provides a sustaining background; or they use ideas which, by sheer force, can withstand extensive repetition. I found Sweeney's second movement the most convincing for it seemed sustained by a progress inherent in the ideas.

The Vanbrughs gave a neat account of Mozart's Quartet in B flat KS89; but the concert's highlight was the Quintet in G minor KS 16, in which Constant in Zanidache played the second viola part. The musicians resisted the temptation to wring expression out of the slow movement; they let this wonderful music speak for itself.

The finale can sound so frivolous it seems to belong to another piece. But here, and every where else, the Vanbrugh's timing and tempo created a warming impression of wholeness.