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The Barbirolli Quartet
String Quartet
- 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, Jánaček, 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 Jánaček’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, Jánaček 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.)