ROMANTIC TRAVELOGUES / Concordia Quartet / Review

 

ROMANTIC TRAVELOGUES 

Concordia Quartet 

Yong Siew Toh Conservatory Concert Hall 

Saturday (27 July 2024)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 29 July 2024 with the title "Concordia Quartet does justice to rarely heard Romantic works".

The Concordia Quartet, part of the Resound Collective family, has just returned from a successful concert tour to Malaysia, where it gave workshops and performed concerts in Kuala Lumpur and Malacca. Its homecoming concert was a showcase of rarely-heard Romantic repertoire which made one wonder why such good music is not so often performed. 

One reason is the need for excellent professional musicians in peak form to do these works justice, but violinists Edward Tan and Kim Kyu Ri, violist Martin Peh and cellist Lin Juan were fully up to the task. Four years of playing together, with challenges along the way (chiefly the pandemic), bore ample fruits of their labour for all to see and hear. 

Franz Schubert’s Quartettsatz (Quartet Movement) in C minor (D.703) opened the evening. This posthumously published 9-minute single movement of an unfinished string quartet is now recognised as a standalone work. 

Its tension-filled beginning was well-handled, revealing strong cohesion between the players, the stress later diffused by Tan’s solo violin melody in A flat major. This alternating between major and minor keys gave the piece an unsettling feel, which was kept on edge by the foursome all through its short but compact duration. 

Martin Peh demonstrates on the viola
what American-Indian drumming sounds like.

Malaysian violist Andrew Filmer served as an well-spoken host by introducing the works in an intelligent and engaging manner, later joining the quartet for Antonin Dvorak’s String Quintet No.3 in E flat major (Op.97). This is sometimes known the American Quintet as it was composed when he was director of the National Conservatory of Music of America in New York City. 

The second viola gave the music an added warmth, which radiated through its four movements. The use of pentatonic melodies and percussively drumming beats was reflective of native American influences which Dvorak incorporated into the score. However, the music’s smiling congeniality and harmonic richness was all Slavonic. 

The Larghetto slow movement provided a calming respite, with Peh’s viola hymn-like melody a theme for the lovely set of variations to follow. The finale’s skipping dance rhythms and light-heartedness, performed with such infectious zest, made for a most satisfying conclusion. 

Felix Mendelssohn’s String Quartet No.4 in E minor (Op.44 No.2) was composed during his blissful honeymoon in Bavaria. Beethovenian elements of strife and struggle were dispelled, giving way to a sunny disposition to be found in his famous Violin Concerto (Op.64), also in the same key. 

United voices, so aptly reflected in the quartet’s name, made the music truly sing. The Scherzo flew with fairies’ wings, its repeated staccatos touched with feathery lightness, while the Andante relived in Tan’s tender violin melody Mendelssohn’s most lyrical Songs Without Words. The Presto agitato finale soared ahead with accurate rapid playing but whimsicality would never be far away. 

Warm applause was reciprocated with an encore which the Concordia had brought across the Causeway for its Malaysian audiences, with Kelly Tang’s wittily contrapuntal arrangement of Singaporean folksong Di Tanjong Katong providing sheer delight.