Review: Kreutzer Quartet; Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, University of York

10:31am Wednesday 14th May 2008

"Tis distance lends enchantment to the view." Thomas Campion might have added that it also lends perspective.

Playing in the university's spring festival of new music, the Kreutzer sugared its nuttier offerings with string quartets by Janacek and Bartok at the start and finish.

It was a wise move. The newer works on the menu gained not, perhaps, enchantment but certainly a sense of belonging to a musical continuum. Take Janacek's First Quartet, nicknamed The Kreutzer after Tolstoy's novella. Its largely angry mood - witness the jagged inner voices in the third movement - is never really dispelled by the uneasy tenderness of the final Adagio. Certainly it wasn't in this performance.

Anger briefly departed for Thomas Simaku's Second Quartet (Radius), almost an anthology of quartet techniques, beautifully concocted. Coming quickly to the boil, it then dissipates into ghostly shimmering and darting traceries, before slower lines gyrate around a steady cello.

Ruth Crawford Seeger's Quartet of 1931 sported some jolly cross-rhythms early on, but grinding dissonance later became, frankly, hard to take. Mihailo Trandafilovski, the group's second violin, wrote his Quartet only last year. Like Seeger's, it recalled Janacek's anger: violence was never far from its surface.

Bartok's Third Quartet seemed almost breezy by comparison. Here the Kreutzer felt much more at home, giving a keen edge to the composer's motor-rhythms. The coda was a model of clarity, with taut ensemble. And not a note of anger in sight. Enchantment, rather.

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