THE GREAT FUGUE, St Mary’s Church, Wivenhoe, Essex

THE REVOLUTIONARY DRAWING ROOM QUARTET, Adrian Butterfield and Dominika Fehér (Violins), Rachel Stott (Viola), Andrew Skidmore (violincello).

A performance as part of THE SUFFOLK VILLAGES FESTIVAL

I was privileged to attend this wonderful concert by the above-named ‘period  instrument ensemble’ in the most impressive of churches, acoustically perfect beneath  what appeared to be severed heads upon the church rafters and the cupola on its tower outside that seemed  to me to be a tiny version of nearby Colchester Park’s bandstand. The details and history and music behind this concert were fulsomely described in a programme, but this is my personal note on how it affected me.

I love chamber music, and the period instruments here had a quality that was both mellow and edgy, if that were possible, instruments skilfully and somehow spiritually wielded, to my musically non-technical ears. 

The sound audit-trail of the violoncello within the tuneful skeins of the other instruments was hypnotic in Haydn’s Op. 76, No. 6, and I found much hiding in Haydn that I had never discovered before. 

Of course, Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, strictly op. 133, but also as part-time movement in one of the composer’s late string quartets (all of which I have thrived upon for many years) was staggeringly heard by me in this church as both a part of the whole Beethoven experience from within its period as well as modern and manic. Not with the spirit of Xenakis exactly, but certainly Bartok’s. 

Finally, the ‘Dissonance’ by Mozart (K465), another work very familiar to me, and for what it ironically lacked in dissonance for real — as the Beethoven truly displayed in spirit from time to time but without discord — the Mozart, as here performed, somehow took off into the church rafters as well as around me, finally creating a refreshed work now turned into a new favourite of mine which it had never been before. The last movement of the Mozart was still playing through my head as I left the church and as I walked past the round tomb in its grounds. It is still playing through my head, round and round.

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My previous reviews of local classical music: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/des-lewiss-classical-music-reviews/