A chandelier of shooting stars: The Jerusalem Quartet’s spark-studded Wigmore Hall recital
Storming the hall with Mozart, Brahms and Korngold, the illustrious ensemble sent electric currents through spectators’ spines
The Jerusalem Quartet empowering music. Credit: Felix Broede.
Silver sparks extrude from spiky spheres across the ceiling of New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Beset with spears of different lengths, their longest stalks appear to mirror the four cardinal directions of a compass from the balcony. But from below the brilliant balls resemble showers of scintillas leaping from a welder’s melting metal: offshoots of frenetic light.
Four blazing swords not too dissimilar were brandished throughout last night’s white-hot, lightning-like performances at Wigmore Hall by the Jerusalem Quartet. Approaching Mozart’s String Quartet No. 21 with a fiery whimsy, first violinist Alexander Pavlovsky embarked on brisk entrances boisterous and dainty, comedic and caustic through the first part, “Allegretto”; priming a perfect proportion of accents to surface in the thunderous third movement, “Menuetto: Allegretto”. Slick fusions prompted the four instrumentalists to join sublimely in cohesion even as they swerved in starkly differing directions; deftly weaving fierce chromatic scales with drones and pulsing pizzicati. In the final movement this became a feisty interplay between the foghorn of the darkly booming cello in the hands of Kyril Ziotnikov and the three other strings’ swift, swerving ships.
Drapes of diamonds seemed to dangle in the backdrop of the band as the ensemble entered Korngold’s 1933 Quartet in E Flat major: luscious lapses into languid decadence; the flexing soul behind the Jazz Age. In the “Allegro” movement arduously staggering, thick strokes on cello prophesied the savagery to come. Synchronously a reel of racy scales unspooled on violin to showcase the seductive looseness of the era. Sticky, stubborn notes of lengthily-held passions cast light on the decade’s irresistible impulsiveness.
Chords mounted gradually appeared to mimic Balanchine’s elusive, semi-finished ballet choreography; soft pizzicato on the cello was the sound of pointe shoes’ gently landing feet. Throughout the “Intermezzo” movement scrambles of staccato slid so breezily through the horizon they became a silver platter’s hoisted range of petits fours: delectable desserts uncatchable amidst the Mae West-wannabes that slip them out of sight.
Luminosity loomed large still as the clarinettist Sharon Kam arrived to rudder Brahms’ B-Minor Clarinet Quintet. Cradling melody with operatic flair, Kam leant a timid tenderness to sombre series of soliloquies while tremolos on violin switched character to summon alternating stages of distress. The tentative façon with which Kam slowly set her instrument along the piece’s mournful notes – accruing confidence in pigeon steps – suggested sorrow’s natural bashfulness. Stylistically it was a summit for the instrument; artistically, a sentiment too rarely heard.
Certain piano passages on violin that could have favoured softer, less declamatory enunciation were made humble by Kam’s diffidence. Towards the end of the “Allegro” movement the first violin expelled a graceful echo of the clarinet’s main theme. Call and response was crafted into an exchange between a pair of different birds: suspicious and yet longing to make contact.
Kam’s virtuosity was agile as she swept through trills and trippingly extended scales in the “Adagio”; inviting her string counterparts to channel dark Romantic tempests typical of Goethe with their throbbing tremolo. In perfect rhythm the two violinists struck the bridges of their instruments with tapping bows (col legno battuto) in the final “Con moto” part. While the score instructs the fivesome to diverge into distinct lanes of brusque timbres, harmony held fast through the contrasting sections to grant each a well-earned exhibition.
Ignited by its forays into three works lacking commonality, the flammable Jerusalem Quartet took the too often candlelit display of chamber music and revived the genre with a string of meteor-like flights: exhilarating natural electricity.
If all the compact cohorts treading Wigmore Hall’s boards could be charged with half their might the place of chamber music on the global concert stage today would shine more brightly than the glitchy neon bulbs it represents in our subconscious. This rendering restored the genre to its loftily illuminated heights, reseating it high in the pantheon of classical music.
No mere work of art was the result - but an audacious, hope-inspiring feat.