In the evening following the Nutshell play, many of the same audience joined a host of others in Brodick Hall for a concert given by the Maxwell String Quartet. These young players, widely tipped as the most talented and outstanding quartets currently performing, justified their reputation with a brilliant performance. Their intelligent, lively approach brought a wonderful freshness to Beethoven’s String Quartet in Bb, Op 18 no 6, giving it an open, airy quality that is seldom heard.
Duncan Strachan on cello had the same light, lively approach as the higher instruments, and this perhaps underlay the general sense of perception and delight. Anna Meredith’s Songs for the M8 opened a completely different aspect of string quartet playing. As modern as the latest app, Anna’s music is played everywhere, from flashmob performances in services stations to the last night of the Proms, and though stern traditionalists found it difficult, most of the audience were fascinated.
From the pizzicato start, we were caught in vicarious experience of traffic and roads, an accident, perhaps, and heavy rain. The evoked ideas last longer in the mind than details of the music, but it is a piece impossible to forget. James MacMillan’s Memento had much of the elegiac feeling of his Piper Alpha piece, and here, as in the two Shostakovich pieces that followed, Liam Lynch and George Smith, violins, and Asher Zaccardelli, viola, came together with the cello in warm, delectable balance. The concert closed with Ravel’s wonderful String Quartet in F, gentle and tuneful, always light in texture yet building to an exciting finale.
The applause was prolonged and richly deserved, springing from an exhilarating sense that we had heard a young quartet than is set to be the outstanding one of our musical future.