FIBONACCI QUARTER AT QUEENS COLLEGE CHAPEL
Elliot Kempton viola, Luna de Mol violin Kryśtof Kohout violin Findlay Spencer cello
‘The Bayreuth Festival’, quipped one music critic lately ,’It’s not Glyndebourne, there for entertainment’. And neither is the intense expressive work of the Fibonacci Quartet. It is as Bill Shankly Liverpool Manager remarked about football ‘not a matter of life or death it’s much more important than that’. This group of young musicians, much lauded and loaded with prizes the length of Europe is in business for the larger concerns of life.
In Queens’ ornate Victorian chapel (what happened to the original?) their demanding repertoire defied the 19th century certainties of the surroundings. The Fibonacci are all about life, death the universe and everything. They began the concert with birth. Helen Grime’s String Quartet No.1 centred around the drama of her first child’s arrival in the world. She is a contemporary composer with innovative ideas on the way a quartet should emerge – and what we heard was all the chaos, fear and joy of first motherhood. The various pairings of the instruments are part of Helen’s bid to bring the emotions around childbirth into the arena of musical expression. The Fibonacci were the passionate players to do just that.
There was no let-up in intensity and skill for the remarkable work of Leos Janåček in ‘Intimate Letters’ described as an’emotionally charged’ work. Composed in 1928 it describes his obsession with Kamila Stosslova, a woman nearly 40 years younger than him. The piece is almost unbearably unhappy. Beautiful Kamila was married to an Army officer who had helped the composer in the difficult post war years. They had young children and a close family life. The anguished sequence we heard from the Fibonacci is an exquisite expression of longing for a woman the now failing composer knew was far beyond his reach, and the music reflects the depth of his dedication to her. More than the rather grotesque 700 letters he wrote Kamila, was the musical inspiration she fired in him three of his operas ,he explained, were homage to every aspect of her personality from her loving motherhood to her dedication to her husband. Remarkable how a quartet of young musicians can interpret the feelings and longings of a musical genius of a nearly hundred years ago. Janacek died shortly after the completion.
The Fibonacci finished with Smetana’s String Quartet No 1 ‘From my Life’. Elliot Kempton opened with a beautiful viola solo – and devotion to music became the melodious theme. But again sadness and defeat – this time in the deafness which overcame the composer in his later years, yet testament in its very existence to his creative spirit.
A profoundly moving recital with resonance for all the pain and of being essentially human.
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