“… A wonderful experience – chamber music at the highest level – more please!… Stunning performance – loved the music – feel the enjoyment coming from the players and feel part of it myself. Such a privilege…” Audience members 2016
Sir John McEwen’s beautiful and powerful quartet was composed in the middle of WW1 and culminates in a meditation on the old Scottish Lament Flowers of the Forest, originally composed to remember the fallen at the battle of Flodden in 1513. Wagner was among the first of many to value Beethoven’s Op.131 as his greatest quartet. Of the finale, he wrote: “One glance again has shown him the inner aspect of the world: he awakes and coaxes from the strings dance music such as the world has never heard. It is the dance of the world itself: wild pleasure, painful lament, the delights of love, highest bliss, woe, rage, ecstasy and sorrow; lightning flashes and thunder rolls: and over it all stands the tremendous concertmaster controlling and captivating, proudly and surely guiding us through whirlpools to the abyss: he is smiling at himself, for this magic was after all only a game to him. Night beckons – his task is done."
