This concert marked the official end of the fruitful collaboration between Cambridge composer Robin Holloway and the Endellion Quartet, the quartet in residence at the University, a partnership that has born fruit in the form of a set of six short Quartettinos and a full length string quartet. Quartettino no.5 received its premiere tonight and like the others in the series it rather brought to mind a conflation of two or more other composers – in this case the flitting, fractured, febrile textures of Charles Ives’ scherzos such as Hallowe’en mixed with occasional glimpses of MGM musicals in their muted and bluesy close string writing – the ghost of Gershwin. The piece contained lots of nice ideas, but seemed rather discursive, at least in reading though the Quartet rose to the great technical demands of the piece with aplomb.

 

This had been preceded by Haydn’s unfinished last quartet op.103, which Holloway had furnished with a prelude and epilogue of his own devising. Sensitively played by the Quartet, its warm chromatic harmony seemed redolent of the romantic era that was to come, with Holloway’s contribution adding a touching if extraneous frame for Haydn’s torso.

 

The first half finished with the final quartet of another composer, this time Beethoven’s op.135. Particularly notable was the Endellion’s treatment of the grotesque scherzo, providing a suitably agricultural bite to its bizarre twists and turns and conjuring up orchestral colours from Beethoven’s astonishing writing. The famous “Muss es sein”, “Es muss sein” last movement was even more impressive, the Quartet clearly relishing the extreme dynamic and timbral contrasts and ethereal little asides that Beethoven spins together with such masterful élan.

 

Despite its effective opening and closing portions, Orr’s Prelude and Fugue was a rather drab affair, unremittingly grey in its chromaticism and lack of clear melodic or harmonic contour. Good then, that the Quartet chose to end the concert with Mendelssohn’s gorgeous String Quartet no.2 in A minor, a piece which ambitiously  seems to pick up where Beethoven left off, written as it was just a year after Beethoven’s final contribution to the genre. After a very fine traversal of the drivingly passionate first movement, sumptuous Adagio and puckish Intermezzo, it was again in the final Presto that the Endellion players shone the most – the playing in this most virtuosic and dramatic of movements was nothing short of thrilling, not least in the extraordinary quasi-operatic recitatives of the first violin. This was a satisfying concert, intelligently programmed, with moments of truly inspired playing.