KVT – A Quartet Dedicated to Beauty

As we progress in our lives, Diotima told Socrates, we grow in our conception of love. First we are stirred by the beauty of the young body. Then we begin to see the beauty in all bodies. At this point we look to the beauty of the soul. As man is able to identify the beauty in all souls, he soon appreciates the beauty in the laws, and the structure of all things. Lastly we discover the beauty of the forms, the divine ideas. Love is important for it starts and continues us on our path.

When you get a string quartet like Quatuor Diotima visiting the city you know that you’re in for a high class musical treat… especially when you can be in the audience somewhere as acoustically splendid and as intimate as the auditorium at L’Espace. To see a group of this caliber play in a major western city would set you back really big bucks, but, thanks to the generosity of the French, we get a bargain at $5 for a top end seat… (get there early and you get a spot in the middle of one of the first five rows and you are in Quartet music heaven).

As is proudly set out in the quartet’s bio, in 2006 ‘Gramophone’  said that they were one of the quartets you should know about and when you look at their touring schedule over the past few years you can see that a lot of the world’s most discerning audiences had a chance to do just that.

The original, all male, quartet (2 violins, viola and cello) banded together in 1999 and this year replaced one of the violinists with a svelte young female… which sort of gave the group, who brand themselves in grey clothes and shoes highlighted with fire engine red sox and belts, a bit of a fashionista lift.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS3y16VSO18[/youtube]

It was an invigorating program commencing with Schubert’s String Quartet No 7, composed when Franz was only 15 and one of his fifteen quartets. No one in the audience could have helped but notice the intense, disciplined eye contact the musicians kept with one another during their playing.

It was the Debussy Quartet in G minor (Debussey’s only string quartet) that made my night. Composed in 1893, it is often said to be a cornerstone of the modern quartet genre. It combines drama, energy and color to such an extent that it was impossible not to become totally immersed as the first movement pushed to its unrelenting close. The second, pizzicato movement, in which all four voices have their own distinct songs, almost fades into the moving third which, in this autumn season in Hanoi, I imagined being bowed on a velvet night in a grove of spreading hoa sua trees, their dense perfume infiltrating the muted notes. The last movement lifted to a fiery energic level and the first violin flashed across three octaves and hit on the magical G chord and concluded an awesome interpretation of an awesome composition.

We could have finished there and I’d have been in seventh heaven but the group moved on to Smetana’s ‘From My Life’ quartet (1876) and a great performance that finishes with Smetana alluding to the onset of his deafness. When the music breaks off and the first violin plays a piercing high note above a low tremolo you can just imagine that it represents that first  realization that you may have tinnitus (and anyone who has ringing in their ears will know that dread) . The music slowly builds to a climax and very poignantly fades to an echoing silence. Magic stuff! 

What a night!