The gift of silence

Some years ago a scientific research group put out a request for antique objects, ornaments, artefacts, containing air that had been sealed in when they were made.  The idea was that this air could be analysed for levels of pollution that existed in Victorian times, or whenever the object was made, in comparison with modern levels. The sealed air makes me think of the silences in Haydn’s music.  Surrounded and sealed by the notes around them, Haydn’s silences are pockets of silence from the 18th century.  We are connected to the silence that he experienced and that listeners have experienced and will experience whenever the piece is played.  It is also, for some, a communal experience of awareness of a greater universal silence, in the listening present moment of a performance.  (In a way, the silence gives us a more authentic experience of the 18th century than the actual notes, because the sounds that we hear are the result of interpretation and such things as the sounds of the instruments and styles of playing, which have changed – but silence hasn’t.) Haydn leads us to the silence, enabling it to grace our lives for a moment.  Perhaps this is his greatest gift to us. There is another striking silence in this quartet – if silence can be striking. This one is particularly clever. It catches the players off guard – a deliberate banana skin moment when the music evaporates unexpectedly.  Where has the music gone?!  How are we going to get it back again?  Silence rules.  Everything comes out of silence and goes back into silence.. What follows this...

Enigmas and dreams

It is always good to come across composers who we have never heard of before but whose music comes to life with vivid immediacy when the bow strokes the string.  One such composer is Ignacy Dobrzyński (born in what was then Polish-Ukraine), a fellow classmate of Frédéric Chopin at the Warsaw Conservatoire. Dobrzyński and Chopin were encouraged by their teacher Józef Elsner to incorporate polonaises, mazurkas and other traditional Polish folk music into their compositions.  Their paths were ultimately very different.  Chopin was at the forefront of the Romantic movement, his star ever rising.  Dobrzyński, famous in his time, became rather lost in the foggy hinterland of less well known composers but his music deserves to be heard.  We are pleased to be bringing his quartet in E minor op 7 to life. Dobrzyński doesn’t step far out of the magnetic field of Joseph Haydn’s influence in his quartet. Haydn’s op 50 no 5 is not one of his better known quartets but it is as supreme an example of quartet writing as any – succinct, unpredictable, fascinating.  The dream-like slow movement holds its magical spell throughout its relatively brief appearance – a reverie in sound.  What is the reverie about? Who knows?!  This is surely one of the key elements of the very best art – that it offers our imagination opportunities to roam and dream without boundaries or foregone conclusions. Shostakovich’s music stimulates the imagination too.  What is the link between the 7th string quartet dedication – to his recently deceased wife – and the music within this work?  (He was by all accounts deeply distressed by...