Page 137 - FINAL_Guildhall Media Highlights 2019-2020 Coverage Book

There was more than a degree of Beethovenian gruffness in Stutzmann’s interpretation of this symphony, a
sense of a rough diamond being polished to the point where it can glitter and shine. She has a singer’s ear for
cantabile string lines, and it was noticeable how much attention she was devoting to her LSO players,
coaxing, caressing, imploring and occasionally tempering their response. What emerged in the first
movement though, given without the exposition repeat and without the added benefit of antiphonal violins,
was a lean and muscular sound, the brisk basic pulse taking the argument forward with clear-eyed
determination. However, she did linger at times, pausing to admire the scenery, rather than keeping her eyes
firmly fixed on the road ahead.
As the symphony progressed, I couldn’t help feeling that this mixture of full-steam-ahead and moulded
expressiveness, most obviously evident in a number of exaggerated rallentandos and an unmarked
broadening in the coda to the final movement, left a tantalising question-mark over this composer’s inherent
character. Brahms the Classicist or Brahms the Romantic? Stutzmann appeared to suggest that he was both.

I was expecting more to be made of the sostenuto marking to the slow movement, where the initial oboe solo
was all but hurried along, and the music never achieved a feeling of rapt inwardness, yet at its close there
were fine contributions from the leader and principal horn. The C-minor introduction to the Finale was
spacious without being ominous, the pizzicatos a little too regular to suggest portent, the gloom not fully
realised, with little of what Tovey calls “human terror and expectation”. As the rich glow of both first and
second horns yielded to the great string melody that dominates this final movement, I was hoping that
Stutzmann might give us more of a sense of exultation at the daybreak that dispels darkness. When it came,
the theme was voiced simply, almost reverentially, and its hymn-like quality never really morphed into the
jubilation that should transform a landscape in which human resolution ultimately triumphs over the forces
of Fate.
If you wanted to tease friends about the provenance of a particular string quartet, you could do worse than
play them the opening bars of Mendelssohn’s Sixth String Quartet. Very few, I suspect, apart
from cognoscenti, would come up with the name of the correct composer. It is an astonishing work, arresting
from the first moments to the last, and given a most sympathetic reading in this pre-concert event by the
Marmen Quartet, recent major prizewinners at the Bordeaux and Banff International String Quartet
Competitions.

The last major work that Mendelssohn wrote, it was composed in a period of personal anguish and turmoil
engendered by the sudden death of his beloved sister Fanny. The Marmen Quartet’s superb articulation gave
full voice to the nervy, jagged edges of the outer movements with their prevailing restlessness and febrile
intensity. This is tough, uncompromising music without any of the emotional restraint found in the
composer’s other works, heightened by the dark and gloomy key of F-minor. Yet thrilling though the
explosions of anger – none more so than the Presto section of the first movement, driven along thrillingly –
were, this Quartet’s artistry emerged just as strongly in the Adagio third movement. Here, the first violin
captured a sense of vulnerability, revealing the inner workings of a grief-stricken mind, in the soaring lyrical
lines, offset against the darker, woody hues of viola and cello. Equally powerful were the many spectral
effects, accentuated in dynamics pared down to little more than a murmur, with the concluding pizzicatos of
the Scherzo fading ghost-like into the shadows of the night.