#Sibelius strings quartet sib series#

Haydn’s felicitous chains of parallel 3rds and 6ths look so simple on paper but translate into crisp and attractive passages of play, the actual sound more effervescent than you’d expect.

And the rondo-finale proved to be a deft gem, the lower voices of King and Valve not over-emphatic but then much of their work sits in their instruments’ middle ranges. This might work for some of the score’s more obvious and simple stretches but leads to dismissiveness when the first violin encounters sextuplets and that benign flight of fancy lasting from bar 43 to bar 36.Īlso dissimilar to several contemporary approaches, the ASQ eschewed the possibility of radically meddling with metre, sticking consistently to a regular pulse without extending hiatus points, this slow movement a case in point where the phrasing sounded collegial and the ensemble’s underlying impetus unshakeable, except for Barltrop’s solo interstitial breaks. It sounded as though a communal decision had been taken to view these pages as a sort of minuet. The group’s approach to the Adagio was anything but. In the following Scherzando, Barltrop and Hiew produced a cogent, rustic version of the two-voice Trio the only oddity came with Valve’s tendency to anticipate the others at some of the Allegretto‘s mid-paragraph cadences where the upper three players had pre-determined a small hesitation. Unlike quite a few extant recorded performances, the ASQ followed Haydn’s repeat signs. A small thing but it drew attention to a balancing flaw that arose several times in this particular movement. While Barltrop was finishing his 1st theme statement, Valve’s ascending C Major arpeggio was pushed forward with excessive force ditto for the D minor pattern repeat in bars 11-12. Replacing Sharon Grigoryan (absent on parental leave), the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s principal cellist made his presence all too obvious in the opening sentences of Haydn’s Bird String Quartet Op. The regular ASQ members – violins Dale Barltrop and Francesca Hiew, viola Stephen King – contrived to weld Valve into their performing practice with pretty consistent success. Valve’s gesture was sincere, I’m sure, but not really necessary as this undertaking was the night’s highlight, largely due to a solid interpretative consensus from all concerned.

#Sibelius strings quartet sib series#

Introducing the last work on this subscription series recital from the ASQ, stand-in cellist Timo-Veikko Valve thanked his colleagues for programming a work from his own country: the Voces intimae String Quartet in D minor by Sibelius which is the Finnish composer’s outstanding contribution to chamber music. (L to R) Dale Barltrop, Francesca Hiew, Stephen King, Timo-Veikko Valve