The Kreutzers at Wilton's

May/June 2008

Theirs must be the most innovative concert series in London this Spring.

RESPONDING TO TATE featured a wild, rough little piece by Ives as a starter and Bartok's No 3 (inspired by hearing Berg's Lyric Suite) to finish; no more modern sounding music will have been heard in the Capital this week...

Of the rest, the oddest items were two performances of a passacaglia for violin solo inspired by the infamous "crack" installation at Tate Modern - live, with the crack simulated by stretching the score on the floor along the aisle and Peter S S playing it from the back up to the stage; afterwards, a filmed version made early morning in the Turbine Hall itself before the gallery opened. In truth, the music did not match the jaggedness and disturbing instability one sensed at the site of the installation, nor did Aitchison's 'Shibboleth' really warrant two hearings...

Most memorable for us was Steptoe's quartet, by one of Peter Sheppard Skærved's early mentors at Royal Academy of Music. Roger Steptoe's fastidious music is rarely heard hereabouts now that he lives in France. On this hearing, his quartets would certainly merit reappraisal and, possibly, recording by the Kreutzers?

Peter Grahame Woolf

See illustrated review of the Kreutzer Quartet's Portrait of David Matthews concert at Wilton's in January [Editor]

Illustration above: The Kreutzers outside Wilton's Music Hall
l to r: Morgan Goff, Neil Heyde, Mihailo Trandafilovski & Peter Sheppard Skærved

Roger Steptoe photo: Frédérique Avril

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The Kreutzers/Wiltons residency is developing by stealth into one of London's most important and rewarding associations. The audience is growing and last night, for Beethoven, it was nearly full house.

The Shorr/Sheppard Skaerved Beethoven Explored CDs series (Metier/Divine Art), welcomed by Musical Pointers, is advancing and this celebration of the release of Vols. 3 & 4 was graced, as is usual here, by extensive spontaneous-sounding introductions to the music, drawing upon Peter S S's vast contextual knowledge.

This time we were regaled with a picture of Beethoven's conviviality and his involvement with music making of all types, also quite a bit about finances and tactics to secure payment for commissions...

Franz Clement's unaccompanied solo violin variations should be regular recitalists' fodder; they would not be unduly dwarfed alongside Bach's canonic favourites and Ysaye's, and his place in the scheme of things at the time should not be belittled.

The two Beethoven sonatas were given forthright, hard hitting, gripping performances, piano led by Aaron Shorr, as is right for those "Piano and Violin Sonatas". We were told (reminded?) about the peculiar history of the Spring sonata and that Op 30/2 was deliberately warlike music for the the conquering Tzar ... And a Mozart duo was brought into context, and delivered winningly by P S S with the Kreutzers' violist Morgan Goff substituting for a scheduled soprano; music which is far more telling seen live too than just heard through loud speakers at home...

The Kreutzers have a penchant for the new and the neglected fairly new, but the mainstream is by no means forgotten, even though none of their programmes is conventional.

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There was astonishment on offer by Grieg in context on June 10. The Kreutzer Quartet has maintained an interest in Grieg and share with Michael Finnissy a fascination with his chamber music, brought together in this concert, overlong but full of interest.

Peter Sheppard Skaerved, bubbling over with enthusiasm, outlined the complicated history involving Ole Bull/Knud Dahle and the hardanger fiddle, pictured right.

For readers interested to pursue the Grieg/hardanger connection, I urge you to seek out a marvellous CD from Norway of Grieg's Slåtter op. 72 played by Åshild Breie Nyhus with even a track taken from a wax roll recording of Knut Dahle himself [Simax PSC 1287 - New Note in UK].

The players began with a short group of pieces to illustrate the connections and derivations of Finnissy's studies. After that introduction, the latter were presented doubled, i.e. Finnissy's 'completion' of an unfinished torso for piano quintet before the interval and his own working up the same material into a new composition afterwards.

The former movement, half an hour long with saturated textures and climax after climax deferring closure, would better have been left maybe for study situations like the seminar held earlier in the day at the Royal Academy of Music. Its performance provided an answer to the question of why Grieg never completed the piece... I would never wish to hear it again.

Finnissy's 'Grieg Quintettsatz' of similar length, opening the second half, introduced Finnissy's own more familiar idiom after a quarter hour and again towards the end; the piece as a whole was better varied in texture than the earlier study, and might have been better received by a general audience (Wiltons was near full again !) on its own - a similar feeling to that we had in an earlier sconcert in the series, when Jim Aitchison's 'Shibboleth' had been given twice.

The concert was best justified as a build up to an exceptionally committed and powerful account of the Grieg String Quartet in G minor Op 27, a work which broke the mould of the Germanic dominance chamber music at the time to such extent that the critics damned it and Peters Edition compounded the composer's disappointment by declining to publish it. It has indeed been an unfavourite string quartet of mine over the years, but the Kreutzers made as strong case for it as could be; as Neil Heyde said, it is a quartet which needs an audience !

Next week, Ives with compatriots, to be followed by a mouth-watering selection of rarities and premieres on 22nd, each concert guaranteed to prove an unique and memorable musical event.

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Peter Sheppard Skaerved and Aaron Shorr have premiered countless duos by amongst others Henze, Rochberg, David Matthews, Finnissy, Jorg Widmann, Judith Weir, Elliott Schwartz, Paul Moravec, Sadie Harrison, Kenneth Hesketh, Naki Hakim, and Michael Alec Rose. Their American Century recital at Wiltons was given with the piano experimentally down off the stage, presumably intending closer rapport with the audience? That proved an acoustical disaster; whilst the violin sounded OK in Coates' solo sonata, composed before she'd become besotted with glissandi. But for Roberts and Ives, the piano was sucked into reverberation under the barrel-shaped roof, confusing the complexity of much of the music for most listeners.

This recital was another good demonstration of the importance of platform placing and seating positions at concerts, discussed in M P recently in connection with a recital at St John's Smith Square, and from time to time about experiences elsewhere from which I had gradually learned that it can be safer to sit under the lower ceilings of the side aisles in churches and halls with similar structures. That worked at Wiltons and, as heard sitting right behind the two performers in the second half, the music was clarified thereby.

It was a mistake to have given all twenty-one of the maverick virtuoso pianist Michael Hersch's gnomic fragments, and Peter SS's recitation of the poetic stimuli for each one was no help. For the first few, one thought of Webern's concise aphorisms, but soon the mind drifted to consideration of Schonberg's 7 X 3 (in Pierrot Lunaire) and a feeling that seven Herschs tonight would have sufficed... Moravec's Ariel rushed by to terminate this tough recital; the composer, at earlier rehearsal with these players, had urged them to play it faster and faster...

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The Revolutionary Violin, an evening of delights which Peter Sheppard Skærved devised around the Paris musical scene of the time, even had a piece by the not-inconsiderable composer Marie Antoinette.

The more solid fare was a brace of quartets by Reicha and the miracle-teenager Arriaga, who died at nineteen. Both rewarded closest attention, and exemplified the spirit of the time in the equal interplay of the four musicians - Peter SS evoked the influences of Viotti on his disciples, and that of J.J. Rouseau to be found in the pastoral movements which he was surprised to discover figuring in each work in the programme.

This delightfully balanced concert will be remembered for a first sighting of Stephanie Beck, a charismatic young RAM graduate harpist of exceptional musicianship who shared the platform with a gentler than oft-times Peter SS, sitting placidly beside her to accompany rare duo pieces (and even turn her pages). Afterwards, in Spohr's violin/harp sonata, they demonstrated the emergent democracy in music, noted above. The harp repertoire of the time actually anticipated that equality in piano/violin duos which were still, until a little later, dominated by the piano accompanied on the violin, as in Beethoven's earlier sonatas...

Hopefully some of this music, most of it new to the majority of listeners, will find its way onto disc, and including PSS's fascinating wide ranging socio-/musicological commentaries with which he regaled us; links within links, too much to take in easily.

The music itself all sounded quite magical in the Wilton's acoustic, with the faint sound of an occasional passing train not disturbing at all. The happy informality of these concerts was enhanced by the players joining us in the auditorium to listen whilst their colleagues played.

The Kreutzers are preparing Reicha's quartets for commercial recording; Arriaga's have been recorded by ASV, but you may need to search for copies and there is scope for a new CD of them.

Peter Grahame Woolf

Wiltons Music Hall (which now has events most nights of the week) is firmly "on the Map", and that is clinched by the excellent news that the Royal Shakespeare Company will be giving a season there November to January.

PGW