An Apogee of Overpolite Presentation: The Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective at Wigmore Hall
Awe was all-apparent in this foursome’s mostly placid rendering of less than daring pieces.
A selection of members of the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective in rehearsal. Credit: https://www.kaleidoscopecc.com
Dressing their dessert-like pieces in vanilla’s essence, string quartets, sextets and chamber music’s coterie are cordially invited to perform at weddings and receptions; galas and remembrances of the immaculate conception in the interest of inspiring incandescence. Candidness is off the menu at buffets forever feting purity; arrays awash in artificial splendour.
There is a venue for such venerable displays, and it is seldom found onstage. In finest form for a recital of contrasting tones divided between Mozart, Dvořák, Fanny Mendelssohn and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective decked out chords with bountiful embellishment and wishful relish.
Delivering the springing steps of Fanny Mendelssohn’s Piano Quartet in A flat through his chromatic scales’ slow-collapsing dollops, pianist Tom Poster painted the Allegro Moderato movement as an ode to ornaments both tangible and aural. Rallentando-touched andante moments made for pedal dalliances delectable across declining scales. Derailed by their appreciation for an overprecious treatment nonetheless, his string accomplices plied leitmotifs with daintiness.
Whilst violinist Elena Urioste steered her notes to straitlaced instances of mp and mf, violist Rosalind Ventris and cellist Laura van der Heijden likewise bowed down to an etiquette indebted to a petticoat-endorsing era. Licked slickly into shape, the lower strings oozed with more zeal than Urioste – who preferred a constant thinner tremolo throughout most of the concert – but were often overshadowed by their co-performers.
Brusque attacks in Movement No. 3 of Mendelssohn’s quartet were made especially attractive for their lack of tactfulness compared to highly finessed counterparts: a crest of respite from the evening’s sanguine jaunts.
Sublimely lined up in their synchronicity, Ventris and van der Heijden handled Mozart’s Piano Quartet No. 2 in E flat with much coarser gloves. Evoking ardour in their demonstration of its dour underbelly, the musicians redirected the score’s spotlight to its darker entrails. In the meantime Urioste’s echo on violin of diffident piano-made motifs was consummately timed but sometimes saccharine: an image of a tweeting bluebird mimicking a singing Disney princess came to mind.
“Temperate” would best describe the close of this quartet: a niftily engaged finale rife in repetition so well executed that it mimed a slowly wagging finger. It was time for the ensemble to unseal their docile mien – and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s little-known Piano Trio in E minor thankfully let loose its tight Rococo laces. Furore roared with no restraint through van der Heijden’s stormy strings whilst Urioste’s lashings on violin grew piquantly ferocious. Speed was apt enough to expedite excitement in this intermittent tempest.
Trills on piano were proclamatorily intrepid across Poster’s fingers in the opening to Dvořák’s Second Piano Quartet in E flat. Teasing listeners insatiably, they turned the volume up both literally and figuratively on what had up to then been a too-pleasant evening. Tugging strings of gluttonous emotions followed – letting Ventris’ viola delve into a lower section of her instrument imbued in a rich saxophone-esque sound.
An encore laid bare jazzy intertwinings in the pianist’s arrangement of Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine”: a sensuous immersion in nostalgia made an episode of comfortable repose in this group’s overly massaging hands.
Static are bouquets of flowers hoisted in their wreaths and towers during nuptials; numb often are accompanying jocose players. It’s a necessary epigraph of programmed joviality; a vital nod to the endurance of conventionality. Yet at the helm of serial recitalists it replaces otherworldliness with the serene mundane. The Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective is entirely capable of stretching creativity beyond the decorative – but a great deal of sampling and selecting of stylistic templates must be had for it to pinpoint it aesthetic.