Polished, but light on the personality
The Age
Thursday September 24, 2009
ELIAS STRING QUARTET Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre, September 22 musicaviva.com.au DURING the first part of the Elias String Quartet's second Musica Viva recital, the dominant impression of the group's performance style was of well-shaped blandness.Carl Vine's String Quartet No. 4 began with polite aggression, only the outer edges of first violin Sara Bittloch and her sister Marie on cello giving the work much heat, although a central slow solo for the top line made a good deal of not very much.Haydn's G Major Quartet, first of the Op. 76 set, again saw the top and bottom resonating determinedly, the middle lines of Donald Grant's second violin and Martin Saving's viola self-effacing in the developmental pages of the first pair of movements.Until interval, the group had played with polish, excellent flexibility in tempo, laudable reliability but very little personality to mark out this particular group from the general ruck of quartets.The Elias' ability to engage interest went up several notches in two Purcell fantasias, delivered chastely, without vibrato, the lines enjoying dynamic parity in these unassuming examples of musical weaving.But the players reached their most impressive point in Mendelssohn's String Quartet in F minor, the composer's disciplined depiction of despair on the death of his sister, Fanny.Here, all voices were engaged, finding in the composer's direct, uncluttered score a sympathetic vehicle for the exercise of their craft; a relief, after the group's opening gambits, which displayed few signs of communal vigour, making you nostalgic for some of the local chamber music competitions' slash-and-burn participants.
© 2009 The Age