RARE PERFORMANCE OF ALL BEETHOVEN'S STRING QUARTETS

As Dillington House prepares for performances of all the Beethoven String Quartets, Wayne Bennett (Director of Dillington) introduces the project and its significance.

A complete performance cycle of the Beethoven quartets is a rare event. The musical preparation is formidable and only quartets who have a serious career under their belts even think about tackling this Everest of the chamber music repertoire outside of the recording studio. To have the opportunity to experience of listening to these works live across the best part of a week is a once in a lifetime opportunity and an opportunity that visits Somerset once in a blue moon.

The Dillington performances will stretch across six evenings with each concert featuring a work from each of the early, middle and late periods. To provide a greater understanding of the works the eminent musicologist, Angus Watson, will give a series of pre-concert talks about the works being performed that evening. Angus is well qualified as his book Beethoven’s Chamber Music in Context will be published later this year.

Listening to a string quartet requires concentration and for some it is an acquired taste. Four musicians playing together, listening and aware of each other’s playing can make for edge of the seat listening. There is no room for error or ego. It is music stripped to the bare essentials. Challenging as it may be for both players and audience alike, for many, the string quartet represents the ideal in small scale music-making where intimacy, skill and musicianship come together as one.

Originating around the middle of the 18th century, the development of the string quartet soon became the touchstone of the classical music period on which most composers were either judged or indeed judged themselves. Joseph Haydn, whilst working in Vienna, is attributed as having developed the form after which Mozart took it to new levels of sophistication. In Beethoven we see a great composer take the string quartet form from its classical incarnation of four separate but related musical lines to a fusion of sound in which the identity of each becomes bonded as one in a profound unity. Here lay the emotional foundations of romanticism.

The eminent conductor, Sir Roger Norrington, in a recent documentary, commented that he always suspected that Mozart composed for Saturday whereas Beethoven wrote music for eternity. We should understand the point. Mozart aims to please whereas you feel that Beethoven is always trying to take you somewhere profound. Through the isolation of his awful and worsening deafness he seems to abandon the everyday in the search for universal human truths.

Beethoven’s quartets can be crudely divided into three groups. The earliest (opus 18) consist of six quartets that owe much to the good-mannered style of Haydn and Mozart. Written between 1798-1800 they have much classical charm and directness. The middle period quartets are characterised by slow introductions and begin to show Beethoven’s departure from the classical style into new territory. The first three were written in 1806 and are known as the Rasumovsky after their dedicatee. The 10th and the 11th quartets are known as the Harp (1809) and Serioso (1810) respectively. In the Late Quartets of 1824 to 1826 we reach one of the greatest achievements of western music. Begun in 1822 when the composer was completely deaf these works are unlike anything before or since. The sonorities daring and the emotional depths extraordinary. They are so profound that the Alberni have quite rightly spread the performances across the week rather than cram the experience in at the end of the week.

To hear these quartets across a single week is a musical adventure of a lifetime. Each concert is a journey in style and content and so is complete in itself. To enjoy the full significance of the Dillington Beethoven String Quartets then get to hear Angus Watson also. You’ll not be disappointed what ever you do.