Barbirolli Quartet pull all the strings

Philip R. Buttall, 28 Feb 2010 - The Herald (Plymouth)

Plymouth Chamber Music Trust - The Barbirolli Quartet and Simon Crawford-Phillips - 27th Feb

FOUR great string players don't necessarily make a great string quartet. But when they do, the result can be simply awe-inspiring.

From leader Rakhi Singh's ravishing tone and commanding presence, complemented to sheer perfection by second-violin, Katy Stillman, Ella Brinch's strongly-projected viola playing, adding such a welcome prominence to the middle texture, and Ashok Klouda's supportive, yet highly-sensitive cello line, the Barbirolli Quartet is a superb young ensemble that plays with tremendous commitment, yet always with real enjoyment.

Despite the somewhat understated opening of the Three Idylls of Frank Bridge, it was soon clear that this was going to be a very special evening, which the players' highly idiomatic and rhythmically vibrant reading of Britten's Second Quartet later confirmed, with some fascinating sonorities along the way. Communication and visual interaction between the players was always highly evident, though never unnecessarily obtrusive or just for mere effect alone.

If Delius's Late Swallows was similarly unassuming, yet delightfully formed, the final offering, Elgar's glorious Piano Quintet, was a performance to die for.

The Barbirollis had already played their hearts out, but pianist, Simon Crawford-Phillips, propelled them into another sound-world altogether, driven on by his superb insight and technical mastery, to create a performance that will surely rank as one of the all-time greats in a series that has already had more than its fair share of musical highlights.

Never fool yourself into thinking that a CD is the real thing

Martin Dreyer, 22nd Feb 2010 - The York Press

Barbirolli Quartet; Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, York University

Never fool yourself into thinking that a CD is the real thing.

Live performances have a dimension that a recording cannot match. The dynamics of a string quartet like the Barbirollis offer a perfect illustration.

Beethoven, Britten and Brahms were on the card for the group’s appearance for the British Music Society. Nothing unusual there, just a work from each of the last three centuries. You expect chamber musicians to co-operate – it’s the name of the game. But the interaction between these players was extraordinarily close, a hugely positive force.

In Beethoven’s A major quartet, Op 18 No 5, there was a tangible joie de vivre from the very start. They were having fun with Beethoven at his sunniest. The third movement’s innocuous theme and variations emerged with a charming delicacy. Britten’s Second Quartet demands displays of personality from each of the instruments, especially in its closing Chacony. Here all four stepped fearlessly into the limelight, spearheaded by Ashok Klouda’s finely-poised cello. The preceding Vivace's tight accents and the opening movement’s beautifully judged restlessness had been equally satisfying.

This palpable interplay was at its most dazzling in Brahms’ C minor, Op 51 No 1. Its tempestuous outer movements drew from the Barbirollis a passionate, orchestral vigour, yet completely without rough edges. The tender Romanze was a smooth contrast. Their infectiousness gave the music a newly-minted feel, as if straight from the composer’s pen. This was live, electric, the real thing.

Eight String Quartets ......at the Cheltenham Music Festival

Roger Jones - Music Web International - Seen and Heard

"Haydn is generally regarded as the inventor of the string quartet, and for his bi-centennial the organisers of the Cheltenham Music festival had the happy notion of inviting ensembles from around the world to play quartets by Haydn and other composers.

The line-up consisted of three string quartets from Britain (the Endellion, Smith and Barbirolli) plus the Borodin from Russia, Meta4 from Finland, the Royal Quartet from Poland, the Quatuor Diotima from France, and the Australian String Quartet from Down Under....................

The Antipodes was represented by the Australian String Quartet who brought a fresh breezy tone of Haydn's Quartet in D minor, Opus 76 and plenty of Aussie exuberance to Mendelssohn's Quartet in D................

The following day they teamed up with the Barbirolli to create the Ashes Quartet. As Australia and England were battling it out on the cricket field, the two quartets played together with impressive unanimity. Mendelssohn's Octet, performed with such verve and relish, made this the climax of a fortnight of chamber recitals."

A real powerhouse of passion. This was superb stuff.

Bob Briggs - Music Web International - Seen and Heard

"Beethoven, Ravel and Rachmaninov: Barbirolli Quartet (Rakhi Singh, Katie Stillman (violins), Ella Brinch (viola), Victoria Simonsen (cello)) – Alissa Firsova (piano), Wigmore Hall, 11.5.2009  

Beethoven: String Quartet in F minor, Serioso, op.95 (1810/1811)
Ravel: String Quartet in F (1903)
Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 30 in E, op.109 (1820)
Rachmaninov: Piano Sonata No. 2 in Bb minor, op.36 (1913)

Beethoven: the first Romantic? Discuss. This is the kind of question which was once, and I hope no longer, so beloved of music examination papers. The reason why I hope that it no longer matters as a question is because we have the answer through performances such as the two given tonight. With the benefit of hindsight, and the enthusiasm of youth, Beethoven seems to sit firmly, in his later works, with the romantics. Perhaps it is that our young musicians feel more comfortable in that slightly later period, or perhaps it is simply because his ground-breaking works still have the feel of experimentation, and not classicism, about them.

Whatever the reason the performances we heard tonight were of full-blooded romantic scores, and they felt right and good. The Barbirolli Quartet bear’s the name of Glorious John - a hero of mine from my schooldays when he was particularly kind to me. How he would have loved their playing. They got things started with a vital, virile and forthright performance of the Serioso Quartet, which brought out all the symphonic structuring of the piece. It’s easy to see why Mahler lavished time and attention on it in making his orchestral version. Neither were the light and shade and tenderness neglected and the nose thumbing coda to the finale came off very well indeed. If I have one criticism it is that the slow movement lacked sufficient mystery, but that will come as the Barbirolli’s interpretation ripens, as it most surely will. The Quartet revelled in the Ravel, making it seem the masterpiece it isn’t but should be. There was some lovely playing here, most notably an almost miraculous pianissimo in the second subject of the first movement and a cool poise and calm in the slow movement which incorporated a beautiful seascape in the middle section. The finale was given as a real powerhouse of passion. This was superb stuff. "

Harrogate International Sunday Series

Dave Robson, 23/1/09 - Darlington and Stockton Times

"The first concert of five in this year’s Harrogate International Sunday Series saw the young women of the Barbirolli String Quartet draw a very respectably sized audience to the Cairn Hotel.

Formed in 2003 while at the Royal Northern College in Manchester, the four have established themselves as a remarkably fine ensemble, as was evident in the flowing elegance of the opening piece, Alan Rawsthorne’s First String Quartet, Theme and Variations, and in the following Beethoven F minor, Op 95, Quartet Serioso. There is still the strong promise that the players will develop further as they gain experience, bearing in mind that it takes a decade or more to develop the breadth and absolute qualities of a mature ensemble.

I watch them with interest, particularly in view of the high level of colour and sensitivity displayed in the well-balanced account of the Ravel String Quartet in F that rounded off the concert.

I look forward, too, to a solo appearance by their cellist, Victoria Simonsen, with pianist, Sam Armstrong, on Monday, March 2, for Ripon Cathedral Concert Society.

The next concert in the Harrogate series at the Cairn is on February 1, when the remarkable young internationally renowned violinist Nicola Benedetti will appear......."

Timbre Merchants - Four Stars

Nick Kimberley, 19/9/08 - The Evening Standard

"In terms of both quantity and quality, Schubert's string quartets constitute a major body of work. A shame, then, that for the Chelsea Schubert Festival's only concert dedicated to quartets, the Barbirolli Quartet could find room for just one.

On the other hand, you could argue that the nine minutes of his Quartet Movement are so condensed, so focused, that they are complete unto themselves. So it felt in the Barbirollis' performance.

While Holy Trinity's acoustic is bright and forward, the background hum of ventilation and traffic did few favours to quieter passages. Despite that, the Barbirollis' approach favoured bold attack over pristine unity, and the music benefited.

If the players captured the fleeting moods of the Schubert, they also got the febrile, hyperventilating energy of Beethoven's Fourth String Quartet. Not that everything was tension and stress; there was a lovely, open-hearted lyricism in the third movement, while the finale kicked up its heels with skittish energy.

Without Haydn's example, neither Beethoven nor Schubert would have had such a firm foundation on which to build their quartets. It made sense, then, to open with the older composer's String Quartet no. 65, a work of infectious high spirits. There was a clear sense of shared pleasure in Haydn's bundle of little surprises: a change of tempo here, a momentary pause there.

These musicians really search for the right timbre; at one slow passage in the final movement, their combined sonority had the enveloping warmth of an organ.

Debussy's only string quartet made a fitting climax, its sense of structure looking backwards, its sound-world looking to the future. The Barbirolli Quartet invested it with an almost vocal quality, so that the piece unfolded like an opera without singing. Still young, these four women are already players to reckon with. "

Prolonged applause for string quartet is well deserved - Harrogate Festival

Paul Dyson, 08 August 2008 - Ripon Gazette

"This young group promises much for the future"

"a fine performance in which the group's rapport and enthusiasm for playing with each other were both very much in evidence"

News comes......Cheltenham Festival

Geoff Brown, 14/7/08 - The Times

"News comes that the Barbirolli String Quartet has joined the European Concert Hall Organisation's "Rising Stars" scheme. I'm no astronomer, but these former students of the Royal Northern College of Music certainly seem Rising Stars to me. The four women are forthright, full-blooded musicians, afraid of nothing....."

"weaving skillfully through brooding intensity and the sweetly wistful to the dark blood tones of the finale. The Barbirolli's should be watched closely." (Re Brahms C minor Op. 51,no.1)

Seen and Heard Recital Review - Wigmore Hall

Bob Briggs - Music Web International

Beethoven, Schubert, Jána?ek, Shostakovich, Lacour and Reich: Barbirolli Quartet  and  Zephirus,  Wigmore Hall, London, 7.4.2008

"This recital is another in the monthly series Monday Platform, which features the best of young artists currently working in the UK, and what an interesting series it has been. Tonight we were introduced to two very different quartets, and what a repertoire there is for both.

The Barbirolli Quartet got the evening off to a fine start with a joyous performance of an early Beethoven quartet which, although in his favourite turbulent key of C minor, is full of the kind of high spirits which fill Haydn’s quartets. After this Stillman and Singh changed chairs for the other works and gave us a quicksilver performance of Schubert’s Quartettsatz. As light and frothy as Wolf’s Italian Serenade, this interpretation was full of Italianate warmth and good humour.

Their crowning achievement was a truly great performance of Jána?ek’s 1st Quartet. Based on Tolstoy’s novel of the same name,Kreutzer Sonata, in which  a man describes how he murdered his wife because he suspected her of having an affair, Jána?ek fills the music with high passion, love, tenderness and, ultimately, violence. The four movements are terse and full of event, frighteningly difficult to play and disturbing to listen to. The members of the Barbirolli Quartet played for all they were worth, seeming to live the story in an effort to ensure that we understood the details – and the ultimate inequality of it all.

I often find myself complaining that performances lack a true pianissimo, but not with the Barbirollis. Their dynamic range was so wide that they had us sitting on the edges of our seats to hear their most intimate thoughts and being overwhelmed by their fortissimos. The Barbirolli Quartet is a magnificent ensemble which, tonight, displayed great understanding and insight into the music it was playing."

London - Southbank Centre and Park Lane Group

Peter Quantrill - April issue - The Strad

“Elisabeth Maconchy’s String Quartet no. 13 of 1984 displayed the Barbirolli Quartet’s precision of ensemble at formidable rates of energy (9 January), with well-balanced contrapuntal lines in the outer movements that allowed us to appreciate the unitary nature of this short work...”

“…a superbly realised performance of Berio’s swansong to the quartet genre, Notturno.”

“...Ella Brinch’s viola drew together the strands of a poetry nearing silence, introducing one doleful strain after another that floated away on a breeze of fluttering harmonics and unfulfilled gestures. The Alban Berg Quartet and others have made this a 20th-century classic by imposing themselves upon it, but the Barbirolli’s short bows and careful tentativeness captured something intimate and vulnerable that felt truer and closer to the work’s subtextual settings of the Holocaust survivor and poet Paul Celan.”

PLG Young Artists - Purcell Room

Geoff Brown 14/1/08 - The Times

At birth they were called the Stillman Quartet, after their first violinist. Now the four former students of the Royal Northern College of Music label themselves the Barbirolli String Quartet, a proud Mancunian name. They received a deservedly warm welcome on Wednesday in the Park Lane Group's January bonanza of new talent and new music.

However crowded the field, there's always a place for classical musicians so tonally robust and rhythmically precise. The incisive, rocking patterns of Elizabeth Maconchy's short String Quartet No 13 exactly suited their gifts. Joe Cutler's recent Folk Music proved another canny match, vigorously chugging through riffs and stomps with an attractive populist bent.

The sonic tapestry widened in the major Barbirolli exhibit, Berio's Notturno of 1993; though this too came from the friendlier end of new music, with ghosts of melodies peeking in and out, and fetching crepuscular scurryings. Along with rhythmic precision, the Barbirollis' vast colour range proved vital here. I'd rush to hear this superb quartet again, even if they were called the Cat's Pyjamas.  

Move over, Debussy. This is the fast lane

Anna Picard 13th January 2008 - The Independent

Each January an elite group of young musicians takes over the Purcell Room for a week of showcase recitals. The catch? Their repertoire must be drawn from the 20th and 21st centuries. Now, Strauss was a 20th-century composer, Debussy too. But you're unlikely to hear them in a Park Lane Group programme. For the British composers that make up 20 per cent of the PLG audience and a good 70 per cent of the repertoire, such emphasis on the new, or nearly new, must be thrilling. Still, I wonder whether it is quite as thrilling for the musicians.

Artists who make their living exclusively from contemporary music are rare, and those who do must contend with the suspicion that their mastery of seemingly impossible scores conceals a roughness of sound or lack of poetry. The trick, then, is to choose your repertoire wisely and to hint at what you could do with different music. In the first of Wednesday's recitals, the Barbirolli Quartet did exactly that, playing Elizabeth Maconchy's concise, lyrical String Quartet No 13 (1984) with Joe Cutler's neat, bright Folk Music (2007) – a virtuosic dance with shades of Adams and Bartók – and Berio's sorrowful Notturno (1993).

Equally adept in Maconchy's and Cutler's glowing counterpoint and the bone-white, ash-grey Berio, theirs was a well-crafted, emotionally mature performance.

Berio, Cutler and Maconchy 9th January 2008

Peter Grahame Woolf - Musical Pointers

This forty minutes recital was one of the best in this year's PLGYA series. The
Barbirolli String Quartet had been noticed in unusual circumstances - the Barbican foyer MostlyMozart07 - where they had impressed with the rapport amongst themselves and with the peripatetic audience. Those assets were evident at the Purcell Room together with a zestful enjoyment of music making and frequent eye contact to ensure impeccable ensemble. Maconchy's concise13th quartet is one of her shorter examples of a major body of work that will ensure her lasting importance; every quartet consider them for their repertoires. It was followed by a short but hugely entertaining piece by Cutler, which seemed determined to ring all possible changes on a very few chords.

Berio's 3rd quartet (1956), which plays continuously for around 25 mins, is a work of exquisite beauty, new to me. This quartet alternates its violinists, as do the Emersons. Rakhi Singh took the leader's chair for Maconchy and Cutler, exchanging with Katie Stillman for the long Notturno, one of Berio's most important and accessible chamber works, in which the quartet seems to breathe as a whole, with some players holding the central texture whilst others may embroider it - "full of silence", of "unspoken words and fragmentary conversations" (Berio). Hauntingly memorable.

Looking at their website, I am glad to see that the Barbirolli String Quartet have several bookings around London in the Spring, with a well balanced repertoire; I hope that they will retain in it all three of these works specially worked up to meet PLG's requirements.

Park Lane Group Young Artists New Year Series 2008 – 3

Richard Whitehouse - Classical Source

The early-evening recital provided a showcase for the Barbirolli Quartet, one of a growing number of all-female ensembles. Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-94) deserves to be heard outside her centenary year, and ‘Quartetto Corto’ (1984) – her thirteenth and last work for the medium – is a fine example of her late work: its continuous sections outlining a sonata-form and a three- movement ground-plan, with all of the harmonic and rhythmic incisiveness that are hallmarks of this composer.
The Barbirolli Quartet dispatched it with assurance, and was equally convincing in Folk Music (2007) by Joe Cutler – here receiving its London première and a brief but heady compendium of archetypal gestures that begs to be extended into a larger whole.
Dominating the recital, though, was Notturno (1993) by Luciano Berio (1925-2003): the third of his four works for string quartet (though the programme note-writer was clearly unaware of the fourth, Glosse, from 1997). Notturno’s sombre yet fastidiously-shaded and luminous textures and fugitive yet highly focused evolution were new to Berio's music and so give the lie to the charge he was merely re-tilling old ground in his later years. Without at all compromising the work's seamless follow-through, the Barbirolli players drew a notably wide expressive range from its content – opening this up to a degree that the subsequent string orchestra transcription signally fails to achieve. A memorable performance, then, to round-off a recital that surely ranks as a highlight of this year's PLG Young Artists week.

Barbican Hall 27th July 2007

Peter Grahame Woolf - Musical Pointers

A fine and memorable evening at The Barbican, beginning with a visit to the thought provoking exhibition in The Curve .....

Next, two string quartets in the carpeted foyer, given by the international members of The Barbirolli Quartet. This was an intriguing and very satisfying Free Foyer Music event. The audience was at first small, mostly sitting on the floor. A good, sound account of the Haydn, with impeccable tuning and ensemble, was followed by the Beethoven which showed evidence of thorough preparation. A depth of interpretation, and unanimity in execution; no compromise for this Barbican debut! Rhythms had just the right degree of response to the musical narrative, the cellist often taking things a little forward. Beauty of tone predominated, and quiet was often very quiet, drawing in the listeners, but matched by surges of energy for the more dramatic passages and climaxes.

Gradually the 'listeners' multiplied right back to the bar area, and chatter and the clinking of glasses began to feature in the background, but some of us were able to maintain full concentration in this friendly informal environment.

(The Barbirolli Quartet has been selected to take part in the Park Lane Group's week at South Bank next January; and I discovered only afterwards that Mark Dennis had already reviewed violinist Katie Stillman as soloist for Musical Pointers at this year's PLGYM series.)

 

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