Haydn is called 'the father of the symphony' but was equally heavily implicated in the parentage of the string quartet. It was born perfectly formed and after Beethoven had seemingly taken it to its limits, the composers of the later C19th were reluctant to continue with the genre. Only in the C20th did it come back into favour, newly liberated from its classical discipline, with composers able to make more personal statements through it.
Haydn's opening Vivace in the Op.54 no.2 is vibrant and celebrates its own musical ideas but the Vuillaume Quartet were at their best perhaps in the Adagio second movement and first part of the finale. Haydn is gorgeous in these and the young quartet relished the slow burn of his poignant phrasing. There is no devil in Haydn and even his sadness is luminous. Marta Kowalczy is lively and expressive on first violin and in the Haydn was very much the lead.
Debussy's G minor Op. 10 gives more opportunity to the other parts where Daniel Rainey (violin), Claire Newton (viola), and Auriol Evans (cello) shared the themes and more prominent roles. Written in 1893, the piece sounds more modern than that, with its breaking of sylistic barriers, development of an individual manner and change of moods between intense drama and deep lyricism. It is a serious work - its uncertainty and gravity pre-empting the modernism that was to follow it and the quartet gave a compelling account, so much so that recordings of it will have to be looked at very shortly.
One day I feel I will have to express reservations about a young musician in a St. Martin's lunchtime concert but none that I ever see give me the slightest opportunity. This was a tremendous recital and one can only wish for and expect the best from them in the future.
Maggi Hambling, War Requiem & Aftermath, Somerset House, until 31st May.
I was a little bit taken aback by this review of Maggi Hambling's Walls of Water in The Guardian.
www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/dec/03/maggi-hambling-jonathan-jones-national-gallery-london
Surely that's a heresy, or is it a critic making a name for himself. But it is a worry. Does he have a point. Does Maggi now do the same thing whether her subject is the sea, war or portraiture. Perhaps she isn't the latest thing and she sits uncomfortably between figurative painting and abstraction, allowing pictures to emerge from the passionate application of oil to canvas. I've had my preconceptions and assumptions compromised by contrarian commentators before and have to rehabilitate them myself.
This latest exhibition in Somerset House is in small spaces. Two sound and vision installations bring together firstly Britten's War Requiem and a generous selection of small canvasses, at least not as big as I expected, of ghastly apocalypse, disfigurement and horror, and then a Wall of Water accompanied by a soundtrack of gurgling, rushing sea water with human voices. Both are characteristically powerful, soulful and gripping.
Sadly, my favourite Battlefield (shown here) from the book wasn't on show unless there was a further door I should have opened and gone in. I should have asked, the staff were very helpful.Those are, aren't they, stricken horses flailing in a dreadful, portentous scene of carnage. Or is it a torrential downpour with lost souls rising from the devastation.
There are numerous sculptures of driftwood trouvé, some of which might be a bull, rhinoceros or such things as the titles suggest, like reclining nude. They are chosen for their natural, evocative shape but have been given unnatural, but often glorious, colour.
But we need not worry about journalists with whatever reasons they have for making their little points. Being derivative is not a bad thing because there's not much that can't be said to be that. I might be among the first to volunteer to do without war art because after so much protest and opposition to it, there seems to be just as much of it about as there ever was. But these Maggi Hambling Battlefields are as striking and profoundly bleak as anything I've seen on the subject and so the theme is as essential as it ever was. I still just wonder why they weren't done on a much bigger scale.
We could manage very well without 'critics'. It is an oddly pejorative word, somehow suggesting that they are inevitably going to find fault. 'Commentator' would be an improvement. Then 'critic' could be saved for the job the Guardian man did.
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