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.

CD Reviews (The Straits Times, April 2012)

PETITS-FOURS: FAVOURITE ENCORES

Brodsky Quartet

Chandos 10708 / ****1/2

The Britain-based Brodsky Quartet, renowned for its versatility and collaborations with non-classical artists, celebrates its 40^th anniversary this year with an album comprising solely encores, short pieces performed at the end of a concert. All of these are in the form of transcriptions, mostly by its violist Paul Cassidy. The programme begins in the sunny climes of Spain with dances by de Falla and Sarasate, culminating with the latter’s rip-roaring Zapateado, punctuated by foot stamping from the players. The Home Countries are represented by Elgar, of course, but there is to be no Salut d’Amour. Instead Chanson de matin and Chanson de nuit, separated by the whimsical La Capricieuse, provide soulful reminiscence without the cloying sentimentality. Oh how the English loved French titles!

Some of the best music here is French, epitomised by the Blues from Ravel’s Violin Sonata, in former first violinist Andrew Haveron’s arrangement, where the jazzy effects of the original are passed around all four instruments. The Central European contribution includes Mendelssohn, Kreisler and Godowsky, although one might consider the piano quintet arrangements of movements from Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood to be somewhat superfluous. Most of all, it is the infectious spirit of music-making (with two members from the original 1972 quartet, violinist Ian Belton and cellist Jacqueline Thomas still playing) that makes this disc a very enjoyable one.

BRITISH COMPOSERS:

ELGAR / STANFORD / PARRY

EMI Classics 95422 2 (5 CDs) / ****1/2

This budget-priced box-set brings together the music of three British composers whose lives were inevitably intertwined. Irishman Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924) and Hubert Parry (1848-1928) were important musical and academic establishment figures, whose standings in posterity were gradually and eventually eclipsed by the emergence of Edward Elgar (1857-1934). While Salut D’Amour and Serenade for Strings (included here) are hardly obscure, much of “The Lighter Elgar” is. You will not find profundity in his six partsongs From the Bavarian Highlands, based on German dances, but miniatures like Elegy and Sospiro can be very moving. 

Stanford’s fame now lies in his choral music for the Anglican church, and an entire disc by the Choir of King’s College Cambridge conducted by Stephen Cleobury confirms its quality. His Third Symphony, also called the Irish Symphony, uses Irish melodies, quotes from Brahms’s Fourth Symphony and sounds like Dvorak. The most underrated of the three is Parry, composer of the ode Blest Pair of Sirens (sung at the Royal Wedding of 2011), who may be referred to as the “English Brahms”. Sir Adrian Boult conducts his stirring Fifth Symphony, the splendid Symphonic Variations (an equal to the German’s Haydn Variations) and quite appropriately, Elegy to Brahms of 1897. Lovers of the traditional in symphonic music need not hesitate.