Last updated 05:35, Friday, 03 October 2008

The Heath String Quartet for North Cumbria Recitals, St Cuthbert’s Church, CarlisleThe audience was rewarded with a kaleidoscope of musical form and style at the hands and minds of the inimitable Heath String Quartet.

Widely appreciated in Cumbria and the North, they are now globe-trotters in great demand.

Opening with Mozart’s String Quartet in A major, K464, one of the six dedicated to Haydn, the combination of gaiety and gravity was soon in evidence and the strongly-developed counterpoint was Mozart at his most mature from a youthful quartet at its most receptive aura.

The transition to Janacek highlighted the quartet’s dazzling ability to encompass the strange chordal relationships and anguished interjections of his Kreutzer Sanata inspired by Tolstoy’s story. Here was the test of the quartet’s cohesion in this frenzied operatic drama, often referred to as ‘an opera without words’. In the second movement, con Moto, was heard the sinister ponticello (near the bridge of the instrument) that so engaged the two violins with spine-chilling effect.

Intense, poignant, repressed emotion – this remarkable foursome was so locked in to artistic eruption that it would be a thoughtless reviewer to single out any one quartet member.

Even so, the Heath foursome opened the third movement with its tender ecstatic passage (marked ‘hymn-like’) which hints at happiness that might have been, with the viola and cello intoning organ-like chords in the finale.

A further metamorphosis then to Schubert, in his most opulent form with the String Quartet No 14 in D minor (Death and the Maiden), Schubert’s own song, with the slow movement, a wonderful set of variations.

The players gave full rein to the expressive content. In all, the driving intensity of the final presto said it all for Oliver Heath on violin, Rebecca Eves on violin, Gary Pomeroy on viola and Christopher Murray on cello.

ARTHUR C WILLIAMS