Kyan Quartet at Chichester

 Kyan Quartet, Chichester Cathedral, Feb 11

Looking at the programmes for the new year season when they appeared, the Kyan Quartet's Sofia Gubaidulina stood out as a priority date for the diary.  There are six different ways that three pieces can be put in order and the sequence of today's three quartets didn't immediately look like the obvious one to me. But while to travel can sometimes be better than to arrive, that wasn't the case today and, yes, once one had heard how the set worked it sounded right.

Schubert's Quartettsatz, no. 12, announced the immaculate sound of the Kyans, its fluent flow taken at a tempo brisk enough with Naomi Warburton taking the lead and Simon Gurney's cello subtle and beguiling. 

The Gubaidulina Quartets soon became the latest of many acquisitions for my shelves to be lined up having encountered them first during a lunchtime. Tense and spellbinding, the cathedral was noticeably concentrated hard upon the extraordinary sound of No. 2. It's not fragmentary in the way that some such music can appear, it is a shared composition, its chilly, maybe supernatural feeling with plenty of top register playing beginning to swarm after it was separated out between Naomi, Simon, Sydney Mariano's violin and Wanshu Qiu's viola. It was a magnificent performance of a piece of rare beauty. Travel to Chichester from Portsmouth today was delayed and hard work but such minor hardships are soon more than compensated for by an absolute highlight of the calendar. It's one thing to pick out the concerts one would most like to hear but it's entirely another when they exceed all expectations. Not all C20th or modernist music is my favourite but at its best we can have few complaints about not being C18th.

Because we can have that, too. Haydn's Op. 76 no. 6 is what I'd have thought might come first but it is the longest piece and nothing if not by way of contrast, finishing with his sense of order and civility rather than sending us home astonished and somewhere outside of ourselves. The formality of the Allegretto got weaving into Allegro in the first movement. The Fantasia brought to mind the viol consorts from which the quartet came by conjuring perhaps John Dowland moving towards its spiralling motif. One is aware in each movement how Haydn embellishes the simplest of ideas into his pleasing patterns, as in the jolly jaunt of the Menuet and the Allegro spiritoso finale akin to a concerto for the first violin.

I've been thinking for a while we need more string quartets round these parts but it's possible I'm not going to the right places for that. I personally need more Sofia Gubaidulina, having only heard her music in the flesh once before. There could easily be a few more that were in Chichester today who would like more, too, after such a deeply impressive performance. I hope it's not all going to be on disc. 

I didn't think the applause was anywhere near enough. Come on, all ye Chichester faithful, let's hear it and give credit where it's due.