Brodowski String Quartet

Clarendon Muse, Watford, Sunday 11 October

This ws the opening concert in the 2009/10 season of the Octagon Music Club, and it attracted a large audience to what has already become an established recital hall at Watford Grammar School for Boys. David Brodowski, a distinguished international violinist, has brought together a string quartet that has made itself well known, with Catrin Win Morgan (second violin), Felix Tanner (viola) and Vanessa Lucas-Smith (cello).

A concert that starts with the first of Beethoven's Rasoumovsky quartets (opus 59 no. 1) is clearly intended to transport the audience to a musical summit. When first performed in 1807, this quartet advanced the ambition of the form. From the opening cello solo, whose theme is then eloquently pursued by the first violin, this was a polished and expressive performance. The second movement, unusually, is the scherzo; it is in sonata form, also unusually, and covers a wide emotional range - though it would have been better if the performance has conveyed more contrast with the first movement.

Sensitiveness to the phrasing and harmonic structure were notable in the long slow movement. It leads without a break into the finale, which uses the not very noticeably Russian folk-song tune requested by Count Rasoumovsky, who commissioned this quartet.

More genuinely Russian is much of the material in Tchaikovsky's String Quartet in D (opus 11), which followed the interval. It is not such a great work, but is accomplished and entertaining, with two very well known tunes in the slow movement. Brodowski and his co-artists handled convincingly the variety of phrasing and expression. These two works are familiar to every music-lover. But every concert programme should include something more astringent, extending the range of audience enjoyment. To play between them before the interval, therefore, The Brodowski Quartet cleverly chose two short pieces wrritten about 1931 by Shostakovich - one of the greatest twentieth-century composers, but with a reputation for inaccessibility.

The Elegy has a haunting introductory tune for the first violin, adapted from an opera. The Polka has a famous jaunty tune, amusingly varied - an excellent cue for the interval! And at the end of the concert, as an encore, the Quartet played an equally unexpected piece by Hindemith, to great applause.

Graham Mordue