Zelkova String Quartet

Caroline Pether, Zelkova String Quartet

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You need go no further than the Heywood Civic Centre to experience some of the most accomplished and satisfying performances of chamber music in the British Isles. Such an observation was prompted by the concert promoted by the Rochdale Music Society and given by the Zelkova String Quartet on 14 November.

This Quartet is made up of young players who came together through their association with Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music Caroline Pether and Simran Singh are the violinists, Alex Mitchell the violist and Jonathan Pether the cellist in an ensemble which is an excellent example of talent in the process of blossoming into superb musicianship. It is already a privilege to encounter them working together to fill an auditorium with a succession of musical delights.

Their concert began with an early work by Anton Webern, his Langsamer Satz (Slow Movement) of1905. This belongs to the period before the encounter with Schoenberg that was to revolutionise his musical thought and turn him into one the twentieth century’s most idiomatic and laconic composers. It is melodic and expansive in late Romantic fashion, and its darkness and light were well displayed in a sensitive and disciplined performance.

Mature Mozart followed in the shape of his Quartet in E flat K428, which was finely shaped and tuned to perfection in all the demands made on the individual players for rhythmic precision and variations intone and colouring.

After the interval there was some youthful music by Frank Bridge, his Three Idylls written in 1906.

These proved to be a interesting and tuneful link between the Teutonic intensity of the first half and the Latin flare of the Ravel Quartet which closed the concert.

Ravel’s Quartet was written whilst he was still a student in 1903, though in no way can it be considered immature. From the deceptive melodic simplicity of the opening of its first movement to the spectacular rhythmic climax of the finale it is filled with the enchantments that a musical mind rich in imagination and the technical resourcefulness to go with it. It was not well received by the academicians of that time.

But audiences loved it - as they still do today. Particularly when they hear it so skilfully and sympathetically performed as it was on this occasion by the Zelkova Quartet.