Community Centre, Nairn, 10 October 2009

WHAT ARE encores for? BBC Radio 4 recently asked that question, and came up with two answers. In the classical world, it’s usually a lightweight bonus-Sir Thomas Beecham called them his ‘lollipops’. But in the rock world it’s more often the absolute climax of the whole gig: the one or two core numbers that the fans have been waiting for all evening. In that case the encore isn’t really an extra, it’s what the entire event has been leading up to.

The Wihan Quartet (© Wolf Marloh)

At Nairn Community Centre the Wihan Quartet reversed these two paradigms. Their encore was the finale of Dvorak’s ‘American’ Quartet. Their performance of this rather overplayed piece was beyond masterful-it was a revelation of the aching nostalgia that lies at the heart of this, as of so many of Dvorak’s best works. It was also our one opportunity of the evening to hear the Wihans in the music of their Czech homeland. It was, without exaggeration, the true climax of a superb concert.

Not that the audience really had any grounds for regretting the lack of other examples of the great repertoire of Czech string quartets, when the rest of the programme was so rich and satisfying. The Wihan Quartet was formed in 1985, and they perform with the kind of extra-sensory perception that comes from playing together for a quarter of a century.

Like famous Czech string quartets of an older generation, such as the Smetana (a member of which was the Wihan’s teacher) and the Talich, they produce a warm, soft-grained yet clear sound which is both very attractive and well suited to the Austro-Hungarian repertoire. Their awareness of that long Czech quartet tradition is embodied in the Quartet’s name, a tribute to the man who was the moving spirit of the Bohemian Quartet of a century ago, whose members also included two major composers, Josef Suk and Oskar Nedbal.

They opened the concert with the first of Haydn’s set of six quartets, Op 54, and their quality was immediately evident in the absolute security and integration of their playing, and the fizz and sparkle that they brought to one of Haydn’s wittiest quartets. First violinist Jan Schulmeister has all the brilliance to bring off a prominent part originally written for the great violinist Johann Tost.

Next up was the second of Brahms’ three quartets. Their sound for this was much bigger, fuller, deeper, and they brought a tremendous emotional punch to a work that can sometimes seem quite elusive and overly personal. The author of the programme notes wrote that the finale of this quartet is ‘less headstrong than expected’. They obviously hadn’t heard the Wihans play it.

On paper it seemed an odd choice to place this big-boned, complex quartet before the interval, and then end the concert with the much earlier, and shorter, Op 80 quartet by Mendelssohn. But this late work was an expression of Mendelssohn’s grief at the death of his sister Fanny, and perhaps also an unconscious presage of his own death shortly after, at an age at which Brahms would not even have started his first quartet.

The Wihans played this dark and anguished work with a furious intensity that it would be hard to match, impossible to surpass. It is one of the miracles of great music-making that players can produce a performance on such an inspired level as this, not for some unique occasion, but just as one gig on an ongoing tour, and after four hours of driving the length of Scotland!

And so back to that encore. It was an essential part of the evening, not just because it let us hear the Wihans in Czech music, but because it was a crucial release of tension after the screwed-tight energy of the Mendelssohn.

This was the first time I’d been to one of Music Nairn’s concerts in the Nairn Community Centre, which opened in 2007. The acoustic proved to be very pleasing-clear and resonant, and not nearly as dry as can often be the case in such modern buildings. If Music Nairn continue to offer concerts of this quality, I’ll be back for more!

© Robert Livingston, 2009

Links

• Wihan Quartet