CHILD PRODIGIES / Red Dot Baroque Quartet / Review

CHILD PRODIGIES

Red Dot Baroque Quartet

T:>Works 72-13, Mohamed Sultan Road

Wednesday (1 June 2022)

 

When it comes to Red Dot Baroque, expect the unexpected. This concert featured Singapore’s only professional baroque ensemble’s string quartet in classical and early Romantic era music. What? The string quartet became popular during Haydn’s time, and thus not considered a baroque phenomenon. Why? The venue was also not one of the usual suspects, but a theatre space located in the Mohd Sultan pub crawl district. Where? All this made for an intriguing encounter that turned out to be a different listening experience but ultimately a brilliant gambit.

 

The concert’s title Child Prodigies was premised upon early works by three composers in their teenaged years. The concert opened with Mozart’s String Quartet No.2 in D major (K.155/134a) composed in 1772 when he was just sixteen. Not dissimilar to his Divertimenti composed during the same period, the fast-slow-fast three-movement form was just as entertaining. The quartet comprising violinists Alan Choo and Brenda Koh, violist Placida Ho and cellist Leslie Tan produced a smooth mellow sonority on their period-refashioned instruments with gut strings.

 

There was never an issue with projection, as the foursome was placed sitting opposite each other, with the audience arranged in four blocs of twenty in spaces behind the quartet. All this made for a very intimate chamber setting (one imagines the high ceilings of Habsburg palaces in this former rice godown by the Singapore River) with no listener seated more than five metres away from the quartet. That each player could be heard separately and distinctly, without blurring of passages and details was the biggest plus. Also impressive was the imaginative lighting design which bathed the space with myriads of interchanging shades between darkness and light.

This concert was also a 
show-and-tell session on baroque music.

 

All four members of the quartet took turns to speak about the music, doing the “green” thing without having printed programme booklets. The concert’s centrepiece was Mendelssohn’s String Quartet No.2 in A minor (Op.13), composed in 1827, a stunningly mature work for a mere 18-year-old. The three-note-motif of Ist es war? (Is it so?) was introduced, the query of a youngster in love. This had a precedent in late Beethoven (Muss es sein? in the final quartet Op.135), but it still sounded mighty profound from a teenager.

 

This was a performance of good old-fashioned sturm und drang, not least in the passionate finale where the ambient lighting was turned to blood red. The final denouement was a return of the three-note motif, now sounding resigned and quite defeated, an early example of cyclical writing. It was revealed later by Alan that his final notes were played from the original manuscript, thus subtly different from the published version usually heard. That all quartet members used tablets instead of printed sheets was an example of the old meeting the new, and both coming up winners.

 

The final piece was the finale from from String Quartet No.3 in E flat major by Juan Crisostomo de Arriaga (1806-1822), the prodigy once referred to as the “Spanish Mozart” (He died young too, at 20. Sigh.) Despite its Presto agitato designation, this sounded more sunny and carefree, thus the visuals were of foliage and greenery, a nice touch. The applause accorded to the quartet was almost deafening and they reverted to baroque music for the encore: a delightful reading of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Passacaille played in the manner of viols (above). There were many young people in the audience, all rapt in attention, and it is hoped that these prodigies will become hooked on chamber music too.     

Post concert: Alan and Leslie
wax lyrical about baroque performance practice.