A week-long celebration of the string quartet
STRIJKKWARTET BIËNNALE AMSTERDAM Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam
JANUARY WAS STRING QUARTET month. The eleventh Paris Biennale kicked off with a weekend celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Kronos Quartet, followed by a week of evening concerts, workshops for children and a luthier competition. A satellite two-day festival was held in Lisbon, overlapping with the annual Heidelberger Frühling Streichquartettfest, focused on Brahms. The largest and most diverse event was the fourth Strijkkwartet Biënnale Amsterdam, which took place at the Muziekgebouw, a well-designed municipal venue set on the IJ waterfront. Forty concerts in eight days, featuring twenty-five groups from Europe, North America and Australia.
The music never stopped. Throughout the day strains were heard from the Vinyl Lounge, featuring the extensive and immaculately presented records of the collector Jean Paul Ditmarsch. The string quartet proved well suited to the stereophonic era: the repertoire is ideally proportioned for the longplaying format and the relatively small scale of the all-string ensemble proved a good test of sound quality. Many of the assumptions about what a string quartet is – four serious white men in concert dress, working their way through the greats of classical music – are based on the images that adorn those record covers. The keynote speaker Philipp Blom argued that the string quartet has fallen “out of time”: the concentration and commitment to shared experience required to participate in this form of music-making and appreciation does not suit the short attention spans and social isolation of today.
But the Biennale is not about the past. It is an event designed to celebrate the present and to prepare for the future. Education is key, as is recognition of the flexibility of a genre that can encompass classical and folk music, easily collaborate with other instruments and art forms, and accompany receptions. Schoolaged quartets from the Leerorkest (Learning Orchestra) greeted arrivals on the first evening, and before each evening concert warm-up acts from Laura Tunbridge is a Professor of Music at the University of Oxford. She has written books about Schumann, Beethoven, song cycles and song in performance, and is currently writing about string quartets
Dutch conservatoires performed in the foyer. Recent winners from the Banff, Trondheim and Osaka competitions made their Dutch debuts. Established groups observed how rare it was for them to spend time with other groups. On tour they tend to be the only quartet in town.
The large and enthusiastic audiences were knowledgeable and curious, their demographic wide-ranging. That proved true of the musicians and programming too: “big works” were not reser
