Chamber charm

Further thoughts on the ever renewed quest for the perfect acoustic for performance and audition of music. Over the past five months I’ve heard one of my string quartets given five of its six première performances in exceedingly diverse and discrepant venues, so much so as (sometimes) to make almost a different piece of it.
 
The official première was in the equivalent of London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, in the newish concert-complex in Madrid. András Schiff, playing simultaneously in the large hall, was a dangerous rival; nevertheless the smaller was substantially filled for the chamber event, one in a two-year-long series celebrating next year’s bicentenary of Haydn’s death with his entire mature quartet corpus, variegated with 20th-century masterpieces and a good sprinkling of new commissions. Competition was cruel, placing my new work with all three of the master’s op. 54! In fact the sheer contrast — between the spare wit and frugality of the classical writing, its neat forms and compact lengths; and my voluminous spans and quasi-orchestral textures — deprived the comparison of its odium.

Sometimes mine evoked chorus-and- organ rather than orchestra: its five movements depict (Enigma-wise ‘pictured within’) five American friends; the memory of deep, dark Spirituals lies latent throughout, occasionally surfacing to the forefront in explicit hommage. The young Sacconi Quartet rose wonderfully to such demands (not idiomatic, though never breaking the medium asunder) with sustained chording of great power and sweetness, whose every nuance filled the sizeable space to its edges, creating the illusion of intimate closeness that certainly doesn’t strike the eye here, bruised by angular lines, harsh shapes and colours, unmitigated by an enormous kitsch neo-deco chandelier.

The venue for the British end of this co-commission a week later couldn’t be more different: the grand all-stone centre of Houghton Hall in Norfolk, ostentatious showplace commanded by Robert Walpole to awe friends and foes alike.