Quatour Agate in concert in Brighton – review

The String Quartets by Luigi Boccherini in G minor Op 32 No 5 (1780), Béla Bartók No 6 in D minor (1939), Johannes Brahms No 3 in Bb Op 67 (1875).

A period is afoot of blossoming of French classical talent on the radio and concert hall soundwaves. It’s fronted by some outstanding pianists and bristly exciting small orchestras but quartets are not also-rans in this. ‘Quatour’ hit the Coffee Concerts lexicon in 2018 with the Arod (or should I say be L’Arod?) who return on December 11.

We hear of the 18th Century Paris orchestra performing Haydn’s six dedicated Paris symphonies in spectacular sky blue uniforms with swords at their hips. Here came Quatuor Agate, southern Frenchman, each in standard all-black but creatively stylish, long jackets, with satin-lapels extending down the length of a straight, buttonless placket, and worn over T-shirts, with narrow trousers and patent shoes. The young Agate have decamped from Paris to London, bearing, says leader Adrien Kurkovic, a name celebrating not only a precious stone but also a woman, Agathe von Siebold (say it “A Garter”). She was the German whom Brahms ran away from marrying. “What an idiot!” exclaimed Tom Service on his Radio 3 analysis of the composer. Her side of this story could make a blockbuster TV feature drama that would dismay unsuspecting Brahms fans. She’s already novelised it, entitled “Erinnerungen”. Therefore, love-triangle material comes on a plate for dramatists realising that Brahms’ unavailable maybe soul-mate, Clara Schumann, had her own secret feelings for him deeply fanned by his engagement to Agathe. She expressed them before Brahms hurtfully broke it off.

Brahms and his star violinist big buddy, Joseph Joachim, embraced the German romantic era artist’s philosophical destiny to be ‘free but alone’. Agathe was attractive and adorable enough to stretch sorely Brahms’ resolve. (Later in life, Brahms felt able to modify the motto for himself to ‘free but happy’, as revealed in his Symphony No 3. Bravo! – sorry – BON, you Agates! They bring this to wider attention. The Coffee Concerts take their audiences deeper than the music’s surface, through their free, printed concert programme notes, written by Chris Darwin, helped occasionally by Andrew Polmear. Brahms’ sensitivities towards females psychologically were haunted, one may suspect, from his teenage years playing pocket-money piano in his hometown port of Hamburg’s hooking-house halls. Mix in the compulsory work ethic of a composer, plus its enforced loneliness, and in adulthood he was quite probably quietly ambivalent in female company. Hence his music, which the pianist Paul Lewis has remarked, is not somewhere you go to find jokes or fun.

But lo and behold, here Quatuo Agate brought some of Brahms’ happiest-written music. His third quartet certainly wipes the floor with his first two, ultra-serious efforts. He becomes the viola player’s friend, too, casting the instrument as his eloquent messenger of, by his own admission, “the most amorous and affectionate” music he had yet written. Before this performance, the quartet’s Raphaël Pagnon alerted the audience of how much he was about to enjoy himself. Mr Darwin quoted Brahms’ words to the work’s dedicatee that “the quartet resembles your wife somewhat – it is dainty and original.” As if a viola ever souded dainty! Brahms often misleadingly teased listeners in advance about his next new music’s character, but this music he gladly vaunted as his own light relief from his co-running compositional grappling with his heavy Symphony No 1.

Violist Pagnon repaid Brahms’ trust in his exposed role, as Quatuor Agate in turn used this piece as their prescribed respite after delivering the late 1930s anguish of Bartók’s last quartet. This Hungarian composer’s blend of modern harmony with raw East European folk melody and rhythm is a style frightening to many and this work, borne amid rank austerity befalling Bartók’s late personal life, picks the viola for prominent duty from the outset. Apart from circus tricks in horseback there’s not much Bartók doesn’t ask smoothed and polished west European fiddlers to slap or pluck, ping or scratch from their instruments, to pull us all eastwards. It’s all co-ordinated to express the kind of things in extremis that music steps calmly in to do where stricken words can’t. Like when different agonies combine to dictate destiny: when your mother is dying, your government is backing Hitler, and now your home lies across the aliening Atlantic.

In this, the Agate were vivid, they were strong, subtle, startling, they were humbly and searingly superb. And there’s no need be afraid of Bartók at the Coffee Concerts. There was reassuring preparation in Mr Polmear’s descriptive programme notes, sharing our apprehension but sharingadvice coming almost like a GP’s gentle assurance that things won’t be a bad as you’d been fearing (interesting . . . that was Dr Polmear’s exact profession)

A beauty of the Coffee Concerts, and a secret of their audience growth at Hove’s Old Market and the Corn Exchange was that whether the music is new or unfamiliar, then reading about it in the free programmes gives enlightening – and re-enlightening – navigation through it. That continued at ACCA but I think could now falter. Recent Coffee Concerts have featured auditorium darkness during the performance.

The Dome and Strings Attached must now sort out their act with the counter-productive ACCA lighting crew. To light for reading will enable audience development . . . or not to, prevent that growth, and see audience figures remain at their post-pandemic damage level. That interaction, between the printed word being read as the music is heard, clicks-in new listener engagement at their most receptive and non-distracted moment. Not all of us have time or the domestic environment to investigate the programme at home later.

Dr/Mr Polmear will have startled almost everyone on Sunday when he wrote that Haydn could not be popularly regarded as ‘the father of the string quartet’. You needed to know about Boccherini’s 99 quartets, which began a year earlier than Haydn’s 68. And, of course, remember the forerunning consorts of viols of the Baroque composers.

Thus Mr Polmear’s emphasising the rarity of Quatuor Agate’s inclusion of Boccherini, let alone starting off the morning with him, was to re-orientate to reality even the staunchest Haydn fan.

It will be among the last wisdom Dr Polmear will impart to us. He died quite suddenly on September 20. He is a loss to the Brighton music and dance audience community too broad and saddening to convey here. I hope to tackle it in a separate article.

Richard

Next Coffee Concerts (same venue and start time)

November 20: prizewinning new Paddington Trio – Tuulia Hero, violin; Patrick Moriarty, cello; Stephanie Tang, piano (Finnish – Irish – American): Judith Weir, ‘Your Light May Go Out’ (middle movement from Piano Trio Two, 2004); Beethoven, Piano Trio in D major Op70 No 1 ‘Ghost’; Arvo Pärt, Mozart-Adagio (from the Piano Sonata in F major K280); Shostakovich, Piano Trio No 2 Op67.

Spot the underlying theme! The last two works came in response to the death of close friends. Weir’s has a Zen title but is an English folk tune, in ghostly presentation until darkness meets light. The posthumously- applied title of Beethoven’s masterpiece follows Czerny’s description of the slow movement.

December 11: Quatuor Arod: string quartets by Debussy in G minor Op10; Benjamin Attahir, ‘Al’ Asr’ (2017 commission by Arod); Mendelssohn No 3 in D Op44 No 1. Attahir was 28, Mendelssohn 29, Debussy 31 and liberating the string quartet genre with this his only quartet. Toulouse-born Attahir is evoking afternoon Muslim prayer in extreme heat but adding elements of Oriental, Gregorian and Jewish Klezmer to the mixing bowl. The piece is still evolving in Quatuor Arod’s hands.

Remaining dates: January 22, Philip Higham, cello; February 19, Heath Quartet (strings); March 18, Joanna MacGregor (piano) with Brighton Philharmonic Chamber Ensemble.