BRODSKY QUARTET IN RECITAL / Review

 

BRODSKY QUARTET

Yong Siew Toh Conservatory Concert Hall

Tuesday (3 March 2026)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 5 March 2026 with the title "Brodsky Quartet delivered taut ensemble work in Singapore debut".

Established in 1972, the UK-based Brodsky Quartet is likely the world’s longest-lived string quartet with some of its founding members still performing. Second violinist Ian Belton and cellist Jacqueline Thomas were there from the very beginning, later joined by violist Paul Cassidy in 1982 and first violinist Krysia Osostowicz in 2021 to form the present group.

Photo: Michael Huang

The Brodsky’s Singapore debut opened with J.S.Bach’s Sonata No.3 in C major (BWV.1005), originally conceived for unaccompanied solo violin, and arranged for quartet by Cassidy. With every note of the original retained, the polyphonic quality of its four movements was now amplified.

Despite the division of labour between four players, tautness of ensemble was key in reining in the extra voices. There was much pleasure in hearing the viola and cello singing the main themes for a change, added lines of counterpoint, and rustic drones in the fugue (which seemed to quote the London Bridge ditty) and the vigourous dance-like finale.

All three works performed was the third work of the genre by each composer. Heard next was English composer Benjamin Britten’s String Quartet No.3 in G major (Op.94), his final completed work from 1975. The acerbic and dissonant idiom lent an extra edge to the work’s autumnal quality.

The opening focused on instruments playing as couples, the next worked on repeated and insistent rhythms, while the central movement highlighted first violinist Osostowicz’s solo as leading voice in a birdsong of sorts. The Burlesque’s demented little waltz that followed uncannily foreshadowed the second half’s quartet by Dmitri Shostakovich, who had died earlier in the year.

First violinist Krysia Osostowicz
was once the violinist of Domus (piano quartet).

The finale, Recitative and Passacaglia, quoted from Britten’s final opera Death in Venice, and included a gently rocking dirge-like theme that was passed from one instrument to another before closing with a whispering finality. One could not have hoped for a more persuasive or sublime reading.

Photo: Michael Huang

Completing the evening was Soviet-era Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s String Quartet No.3 in F major (Op.73). Composed in 1946, after the end of the Second World War, the grimness of preceding events was masked by the risus sardonicus of its seemingly jolly opening. The quartet soon exposed the ruse with the music getting more convoluted and being waylaid into a fugal cul-de-sac.

Shostakovich's wry smile.

Founding cellist Jacqueline Thomas
spoke about Shostakovich's art of coded music.

The similarity of the second movement’s tipsy waltz to the earlier Britten Burlesque and ensuing tip-toeing of marionettes on strings revealed both composers shared a musical and spiritual camaraderie that transcended distance and ideology. Cellist Thomas shared with the audience Shostakovich’s unofficial titles for the movements and hidden messages. The third movement’s message was “war unleashed”, and the quartet duly delivered the bunker-buster bombs.

What could only follow was a funeral march in a form of a passacaglia, a grieving that was genuine and heartrending which the surface Klezmer-influenced gaiety of the finale barely disguised. The finale denouement was an uneasy calm yielded by quiet resignation. The gloom was lifted with two delightful encores, Thomas’ arrangements of short Shostakovich pieces, an Elegy and Polka, which brought down the house.