Review of the Chamber Music Festival in Beer: A string ensemble that dazzles with Schubert, Strauss and Schoenberg | classical music

TThis week’s Hodge report has formally identified problems that have long been apparent anecdotally. The arts in the UK are underfunded and burdened by bureaucracy for what little money there is in the contracting industry. It is encouraging, then, to see a new major philanthropic step in this breach.

Veteran London violin dealers, J&A Beare, have been supporting students and professional players with loan instruments for nearly five decades. Now they are upping the ante with a new cultural fund, established to provide advanced lessons, scholarships and practical support to stringed instrument players. A biennial mini-festival, featuring Beer’s instruments and international players, was launched last night at a sold-out Cadogan Hall, with a second concert at the Wigmore Hall this evening.

Talk about a supergroup. The sheer weight of the star power assembled here was astonishing: violinists Janine Jansen, Ning Feng, and Alexander Sitkovetsky; French quartet Quatuor Ébène; violinists Timothy Ridout and Amihai Grosz; Cellists Kian Soltani and Daniel Blendolph. But an army of musical generals needs serious musical scope to conquer, and they got it in Schubert’s massive string piece in C major – the composer’s farewell to chamber music and life in 1828 – and in the rule-breaking, harmony-breaking sextet Verklärte Nacht of 1899. The opening sextet from Strauss’s Capriccio was a buffer between them.

Schubert saw that the Ebens were joined by Soltani. Where Mozart and Beethoven added an additional viola to their quintets, Schubert chose the cello. The effect is grounding, expansive, and perfectly rooting a musical glimpse of heaven on earth. And it was Soltani who provided that guiding strand, the physical double of the ghostly violin in the famous Adagio, and the defiant life force in the fanfare of the scherzo, which holds us fast through the convulsive dance of the finale. If the quartet’s instinct was to skim the surface of this monumental work with expensive elegance, Soltani had to delve deeper into it. The resulting conversation, and sometimes debate, was compelling.

Where Schubert teeters on the edge of life, Schoenberg stands on the edge of harmony itself, one foot suspended above the void. When Janssen recorded it in 2013, she and her carefully selected ensemble leaned into this, underscoring the musical melodrama of a story that sees a woman confess to her lover that she is pregnant by another man. Since then, the Dutch violinist’s style has audibly softened, as her moonlit tones – shimmering high and sweet through the ensemble, from the silver to the bronze warmth of the viola gross – have come to underscore the strange, shifting ambiguity of this “changing night.” Group intimacy was first and foremost here, allowing the fluid score to find its own form without undue interference. It takes a lot of skill to subjugate a Schoenberg score, and still more skill to surrender to it completely.