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Kreutzers and Friends at Wilton's

Beethoven String Quartet No 1 in F Op 18 No 1
Boccherini Quintet 'La Musica Notturna delle Strade di Madrid' G 324
Jeremy Dale Roberts String Quintet (world premiere)

Kreutzer Quartet (Peter Sheppard Skaerved, Mihailo Trandafilovski, Morga Goff, Neil Heyde)
with Bridget MacRae (cello)

May 22, 2013 Wilton's Music Hall, London

For their 2003 season in the refurbished and re-opened Wilton's Music Hall (with much still to be done !), the Kreutzer String Quartet plans to be augmented with a colleague for each concert.

For this auspicious opener, cellist Bridget MacRae joined them for a spectacular example of Boccherini's numerous string quintets with 2nd cello and for the notable premiere of an unique work by Jeremy Dale Roberts.

This concert was being recorded for future broadcasting on BBC R3.

Roberts' String Quintet (2012) is in two parts, played as planned either side of the interval. Its dedications and "programme" (related to Marina Tsvetaeva, Rilke, Virginia Woolf, Edvard Munch and his teacher Priaulx Rainier amongst others) was too complex for first time listeners to make the connections.

The concert interval was related to a death in Woolf's To the Lighthouse which, I think, Jeremy Dale Roberts hoped listeners might have read... In his music, that is characterised by "a hole in the musical texture", with the viola's chair empty, Morgan Goff's viola at first silent and then heard off-stage. *

The music is compelling and very visual; it calls for a DVD to follow the BBC recording; definitely worth keeping a look-out for the schedules.

This is a series not to be missed.

Peter Grahame Woolf

* Peter S S published the following note on his website and it was also reproduced on the Wilton's concert programme: ‘This Quintet was originally intended as a tribute to my teacher, Priaulx Rainier, whose centenary fell in 2004. It was to have been performed at St Ives, her home for many years, which had also been the holiday home of Virginia Woolf. So ideas from ‘To the Lighthouse’ (based on St Ives) fed into the piece. (Many years previously I had planned another string quintet, in which as here the viola was to play a dominant role. This was to be called ‘Marina’ in hommage to the great Russian poet Tsvetaeva). So already a number of indomitable ‘saints’ were at hand ready to be impersonated by the viola, that most androgenous of instruments. But during the long process of conception and composition when so much was provisional another strand came into play, inspired by the Frieze of Life sequence of paintings by Edvard Munch, notably the ‘Voice’ and the wonderful ‘Dancers by the Shore’ in Prague. This was almost inevitable, given the background of the sea and the almost Bergmann-esque persona of the individual woman. But it would be a mistake to read the piece as ‘programmatic’: quite as stimulating as these ideas may have been, the setting up of relationships – pairs and trios, solos, tuttis – gave rise to musical material. The work is in two parts separated by an interval. The first part may be performed on its own’. I have since learnt that the second part relates also to the early death of clarinettist Pamela Woolf, a close friend of Jeremy Dale Roberts; Morgan Goff's mother and my sister. PGW