Above: Flinders Quartet: Thibaud Pavlovic-Hobba (violin), Zoe Knighton (cello), Wilma Smith (violin) and Helen Ireland (viola). Photo credit: Pia Johnson. Featurd Image: Karin Schaupp in concert at City Recital Hall with Flinders Quartet. Photo credit: Annelise Maurer.
The Musica Viva national concert tours, workshops, live recordings and events have begun for 2023 in exemplary style. To start this year, renowned guitar virtuoso Karin Schaupp joined Flinders Quartet in a programme featuring works from Boccherini’s eighteenth century to right now.
These two important and awarded performing entities collaborated on an enlightening and accessible programme of new and established works for string quartet, guitar solo. The works included those for guitar with quartet in original scoring versions as well as arrangement.
At the huge, beating heart of this programme is the presentation of a work in premiere for this line-up by Australian composer and former Musica Viva Artistic Director, Carl Vine.
Commissioned for Musica Viva by Kathryn Bennett, Endless for guitar and string quartet is this tour’s custom-made new work for all featured artists to play as an ensemble. It marked Carl Vine’s first time writing for guitar and for the talents of Karin Schaupp.
This work is a tribute to the late Jennifer Bates, Kathryn’s daughter. The reference to Jennifer’s tragic death at the hands of an under-the-influence driver shocked the audience. It also made Carl Vine’s inimitably focussed, clear narrative and pictorial soundscape even more touching.
This concert’s seamless joint string voice from Flinders Quartet was here full of aching arched expression. The work’s shifting situational and emotional scenes also requires humour and vividly coloured characterisations. These challenges were conquered by the quartet, which worked well with Schaupp’s guitar line and colours throughout the tribute’s compact, contrasted sections.
Endless opened the concert’s second half. By this stage of the night the refined and natural blend of the quartet with guitar had been well established, as was the incredible warmth of the quartet’s voice as well as strong solo voices of each string player where required.
This concert celebrates the sound of the guitar and strings, both in works written for quartet and guitar, or in impressive arrangement. Ferdinando Carfulli’s early nineteenth century celebration of guitar in his Guitar Concerto in A mojor, Op 8 worked well in arrangement for string quartet accompanying rather than full orchestra.
This work by the Italian guitarist was a bright, shiny and clear way to open this touring programme. Its fine guitar writing, handled with precise passion by Karin Schaupp, was echoed a little later in Mario Castelnuocvo-Tedesco’s rich and gorgeously lush filmic modernism across four movements of Quintet Op 143 (for Guitar and String Quintet)-1950.
Hearing the same line up, a rare one for our concert halls, now with twentieth-century richness, accent, string effects and textural options was a rewarding way for audience to continue journeying throughout the canon.
The playing of a fragment from Boccherini’s 1798 Guitar Quintet in D major G 448 was also a great opportunity for the crowd to relish the characters and and possibilities of the guitar -plus string ensemble genre.
The possible shapes and colours, here ending the show, worked through a slow movement and a Spanish dance movement- the fandango, complete with spirited castanet playing from versatile cellist, Zoe Knighton.
To break up this programme’s signature and repeatedly successful guitar quintet sound, there were works for guitar solo and string quartet alone. These interludes came in the form of the intimate and modern work by Richard Charlton for guitar, Southern Cross (2007).
This work’s innovations for guitar, embracing modern trajectories and full of beatiful space for plucked sound to resonate were further extended in Vine’s brand new offering for guitar and string quartet.
The work for string quartet alone- Imogen Holst’s early work, Phantasy Quartet (1928) was a pleasure to be introduced to. This composer’s lush, dense warmth with closely interlocked fragments and texures was delivered with beautiful care and direction my Flinders Quartet.
The elusive, ‘fantasy’ feel was exploited by Imogen’s father Gustav Holst as well as Benjamin Britten, for whom she worked as assistant. Her voice emerges as fresh, unique and special in this regard. We were lucky to hear this work, perhaps for the first time
Flinders Quartet and Karin Schaupp also performed as encore a companion piece to Endless. The short work, emerging with a narrative closer to Jennifer Bate’s grieving mother, was both a beautiful glance back to the intensity of the middle of the programme and yet another touching string of humanity to this event’s elegant bow.