Cuarteto Casals at Wigmore Hall

 Cuarteto Casals, Wigmore Hall, Jan 12

String Quartets are hard to come by locally, it's a long time since I occupied 'my' seat, A1, in Wigmore Hall and the very excellent Cuarteto Casals were playing the great favourite, Shos 3, so it was an obvious midwinter day out.

Those who think of Bach, especially in chamber works, as too mathematical have a point in the academic exercises of the Art of Fugue but kept to a minimum of four contrapuncti, it served as an hors d'oeuvre of manageable proportions, clarity and precision. With Abel Tomàs taking the lead impeccably, reduced to four parts of the four-part magnum opus it is entirely viable and maybe that's how it's best done, moving from a shadowy Renaissance viol consort to something much more involved.

Any prayer said before a bullfight would for me be offered for the bull so I came to Joaquín Turina's La oración del torero (The Bullfighter’s Prayer), Op. 34, somewhat set against it. Spanish machismo that feels the need of prayer seems even more cowardly than matadors usually are. However, the piece is warm, lyrical and atmospheric, neither too prayerful or suggesting gratuitous bravado and I came away from the encounter pleasantly impressed.

But if the supporting pieces outdid my expectations they counted for not quite so much once the Shostakovich was underway. A major favourite for fifty years since I first recorded it onto cassette from my transistor radio, it was the whole point of the straight up-and-back trip and came with the highest of expectations. Which it proceeded to exceed by a distance.

Vera Martinez-Mehner took the first violin part with tremendous relish and intensity from the austere dance of the first movement onwards. The sound that Cuarteto Casals make, from the delicacy of the subtle detail to the grim power required elsewhere, is stunning. 

The viola riff in the second movement has always for me evoked a shot-down Messerschmidt, or similar, spiralling down from the sky but the programmatic title provided by Shostakovich, whether as a diversion from his real meaning or not, is 'Rumblings of unrest and anticipation'. Music, being abstract, can be whatever you want it to be but the dark menace of Cristina Cordero Beltrán playing it in the flesh only a matter of yards away  is something that a recording can't replicate.

While it is clearly about war, as with a lot of Shostakovich it could be about a few other things, too. It is heroic and very personal music from a naturally, understandably, nervous man who stood his ground and if I can sometimes tire of poets and artists expressing themselves on the tragedies of war, I'll never tire of this beautiful, highly sophisticated bombshell so far ahead of the model string quartets of Haydn, Mozart and even, dare I say, Beethoven.

It was never less than devastating and entirely hypnotic the whole way through. Familiarity with a piece can help one appreciate an outstanding performance whereas unfamiliarity provides the equal and opposite shock of something new. It lasts until Radio 3 goes back to the studio at 2pm for an afternoon that must have struggled to follow it, after the long, lingering last note and the respectful silence allowed before the applause. Of which there was not enough. Good Lord, I realize that the Wigmore audience are served with the best there is but what do performers have to do to get them to their feet to applaud. 

It's a world tour - Paris on Wednesday then Liechtenstein, Spain and the Netherlands before Canada and the USA- and it's routine for them. But that makes the shortlist for Best Concert Ever for me, alongside 11 others I noted down on the train back. Not much more than £20 the ticket, £16.70 return with senior railcard to get there and back. London perfectly peaceable and enjoyable to walk through, unlike reports of it from Trump henchmen who haven't done so. What a bargain, not that cash comes into the equation with any significance.

Cuarteto have recently released vol. 2 of their Complete Shostakovich Quartets. It's possible I might have to have vol. 1 at the very least even though the seminal Fitzwilliam set ought to be enough, given that there are other composers to listen to and one doesn't have world enough, or time. I don't know. But today provided a reason to believe when such things can sometimes seem hard to come by.