Fibonacci Quartet
Queen’s Hall, 9/8/25
Fibonacci Quartet
Saturday 9th August brought the new generation Fibonacci Quartet to the Queen’s Hall in a programme of works by Helen Grime, Leoš Janáček and Bedřich Smetana. In keeping with the theme of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival, “The Truth We Seek”, all three pieces had core elements of candid autobiography. Turnout was (subjectively) moderately satisfactory, though Head of Music Programme Nick Zekulin’s introductory remarks extolling the ‘Young Musician’s Pass’ scheme and revealing that 50 of the morning’s audience were members of the scheme did dent that impression somewhat. Nonetheless, the scheme is indeed a great and praiseworthy idea.
Helen Grime’s 2014 String Quartet No.1 is a single movement work, but with an episodic character and a degree of arch-like structural symmetry. A jig-like rhythm opens and reappears at the end. Other features include colourful timbral effects like pizzicato interjections and sul ponticello spookiness, as well as moments of eerie desolate stillness (like in late Shostakovich). The two inner parts are often in opposition to the outer. I was surprised to learn from remarks by the Scottish cellist Findlay Spence (after the piece finished) that it represents the composer’s experience of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood. I experienced it as a first hearing of pure music and it received a vivid, engaging and persuasive outing.
Janáček’s ‘Intimate Letters’ is, for me, a favourite piece by a favourite composer. I have written before about why I consider Janáček’s musical language to be very special. His realisation of how to incorporate speech rhythms of the Czech language into his music lends it a directness and immediacy that commands the attention of the listener. It is emotionally involving and the listener becomes emotionally invested in the enfolding narrative. Like the Grime quartet, ‘Intimate Letters’ is episodic, but more impulsively and even obsessively so. It charts the composer’s emotional states as expressed in the over 700 letters he wrote to Kamila Stösslová, a woman 40 years his junior, though both of them were married to other people and she did not return his affection. All four parts had opportunities for individual and characterful expression, with especial prominence for the Welsh violist, Elliot Kempton. I heard a very fine compelling performance that had me on the edge of my seat. Not quite as awe-inspiring as the performance by the Pavel Haas Quartet that I heard at the 2022 East Neuk Festival, but definitely up there.
After the interval, Czech first violinist Kryštof Kohout introduced Smetana’s 1876 String Quartet No.1 in E minor, ‘From my Life’, mentioning that the town of his own birth, Pilsen, is where Smetana had studied for 3 years. Characterful playing projected the composer’s revelatory self-images. The first movement depicted a young artist struggling to establish a creative identity and a career, with more prominence for the viola. The second, an elegant polka scherzo with a schmaltzy salon dance trio, portrayed the dapper figure of a capable dancer. The slow movement, a romance with elements of sweet love-song, ardent protestation and elegy, revealed his love for his first wife Catherine, who had died. The finale started ebulliently with the confidence of an artist at the peak of his career, but a sudden stop and tremolo with a high E harmonic on the first violin depicts the tinnitus which heralded the encroaching deafness and ill health which was to plague his final years. Themes from the earlier movements were revisited like reminiscences. The work ended in a gloomy pianissimo. Superb performance.
Belgian second violinist Luna de Mol introduced the encore, the quartet’s own stylish arrangement of Loewe’s ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’ from ‘My Fair Lady’. Excellent.