Formed in 1979, the Endellion String Quartet marked their 40th anniversary by commissioning four new short pieces from four very different composers, giving the premieres at their latest Wigmore concert, where the new works were flanked by Beethoven’s Quartet in F Major Op 18 No 1 and Schubert’s in D Minor D810 “Death and the Maiden”.
Each of the commissions is striking in its own way. Giles Swayne’s Endellionigma enacts the mysterious process by which four individual players form themselves into a quartet through a set of complex variations that eventually coalesce into the main theme from Elgar’s Enigma Variations. Jonathan Dove’s eco-conscious Vanishing Gold mourns the extinction of golden frogs and toads in Central America in a quiet elegy, punctuated by the amphibians’ fading calls as life ebbs away.
Prach Boondiskulchok’s Ritus, a work of great charm, examines the changing seasons in a series of miniatures that gives a prominent role to each player in turn, most notably, perhaps, providing second violinist Ralph de Souza with a big bravura solo in its second section.
Sally Beamish, recently returned to her native London after spending much of her life in Scotland. Her A Myndin’ takes its title from the Scots for “keepsake” and weaves echoes of Scottish folk music into a beautiful study of memory and nostalgia that aspires to timelessness.
All four suit the Endellion’s warm sound and impeccable style wonderfully well. Three of the original members remain in the ensemble, while De Souza, the fourth, joined in 1987, and they function as an indivisible expressive unit, playing with that innate understanding of each other that only comes from a long experience of making music together. The Beethoven and Schubert Quartets, both essentially melancholy in tone, were superb. Beethoven’s Op 18 No 1 had a grandeur and an almost operatic intensity, with real eloquence and passion in its anguished Adagio. Their interpretation of Death and the Maiden was stark and fiercely dramatic, uncompromising in the second movement’s grieving variations and whirling into uneasy, almost manic exhilaration at the close. Outstandingly done.
