Rochdale music society concert

Stanford Quartet

It was no surprise that the centrepiece of the Rochdale Music Society’s concert in the Heywood Civic Centre on Saturday March 27 was a work by Charles Villiers Stanford, the 19th century Dublin-born composer and teacher who exercised great influence on the developing talent of pupils like Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst at the beginning of the twentieth century. For the players were the Stanford Quartet, an accomplished string ensemble made up of three Stanford sisters, Laura, Emily and Amy and their colleague Jessica Cox. The Stanford work they played was his String Quartet No. 5 in B flat, a mature work from 1908. Their account of this score brought out its lyricism and drama in a very satisfying way, warmly conveying the hint of an Irish accent Stanford brings to his essentially Germanic musical language.

On either side of this were two decidedly English works, though both with a slightly foreign accent. The concert began with Vaughan Williams’ Quartet in G minor, written at about the same time as that of Stanford but an almost student enterprise with only hints of things to come in his later years. At this stage in his development Vaughan Williams was still under the spell of French Impressionism and particularly the harmonic fluidity of Ravel, with whom he had spent some months as a pupil in Paris shortly before composing this quartet. Within the controlled flow of the music’s chromatic textures can be heard anticipatory fragments of rhapsodic melodic lines and angular rhythms that were to inhabit the very personal sound world of his mature years.

The concert ended officially with what was a very disciplined performance of Oldham-born William Walton’s Quartet in A minor. This work from 1946 might be said to encapsulate the tensions in his bitter sweet - melancholic and sometimes strident - music of the previous decade. As the performance revealed, there are aspects of this work which suggest that the composer was anxious to get the recurrent melodic and harmonic structures in works like the Viola Concerto, the Violin Concerto and the First Symphony out of his system. It sounds like a digest of them all, though it stands alone as an experience to be savoured.

The slow movement of the Walton provided some of the most magical moments in an evening charged with delights from British contributions to String Quartet music in the first half of the twentieth century.

The concert was actually brought to its end by an encore: a delicious arrangement of a Tango by the Argentine composer, Astor Piazzolla. This was not very British, but it complemented the rhythmic vitality of the last movement of the Walton very well.

The next Rochdale Music Society concert will be held in Heywood Civic Centre on Saturday, May 8, at 7.30pm when the internationally renowned saxophonist , Gerard McChrystal and the equally renowned guitarist, Craig Ogden will be offering a varied programme of most attractive sounding music from composers like Piazzolla, Andy Scott and Ulrich Schultheiss.