String Quartet In G Minor Op 74 No 3 - Haydn
Counting - Donnacha Dennehy
Quartet No 1 (Kreutzer Sonata) - Janβcek
String Quartet In D Minor (Death And The Maiden)- Schubert
The four young string players of the Callino Quartet are all Irish, and they presumably chose their name from Shakespeare's one bit of Irish: Callino custure me (Cail∅n ≤ chois tSi·ire mΘ). They are all colleens - another spelling of the same word. They began to be noticed at the West Cork Music Festival, in Bantry, in 1999, and last Wednesday they gave their debut concert at the NCH. There was a palpable sense of occasion, and the audience was not disappointed.
To find the right style for Haydn, somewhere between a rural straightforwardness and a courtly politesse, is not easy, but the Callino Quartet hit the target, realising a polished simplicity that allowed the music to breathe freely. The first movement of Op 74 No 3 was perhaps a little cautious, but the second movement showed they were not afraid to take a slow speed, with the risks that entails, and the intensity of the performance justified the decision.
Donnacha Dennehy's Counting, for string quartet and four loudspeakers, was made up of vigorous instrumental sound bites interspersed with the numbers one to five, spoken in German and English, by a male and female voice respectively, over the loudspeakers. There was a certain amount of banal taped music over the speakers as well, and as the piece progressed, sound bites, voices and tape began to overlap and coalesce. The composer has likened the piece to a tragicomedy, but it might have been better had he not tried to mix genres.
The players brought an unusual tenderness to Janβcek's passionate Quartet No 1, which made the outbursts of jealous rage indicated by the subtitle Kreutzer Sonata all the more unnerving.
Schubert's Death And The Maiden quartet is built on a large scale and needs, at times, a richness of sound that could be considered orchestral. The Callino Quartet's control of dynamics enabled them to fill the auditorium of the NCH effortlessly, or so it seemed.