Brodsky Quartet bring Bach, Britten and Schubert to life

Brodsky Quartet
Utzon Room, Opera House, April 21
★★★★

The Brodsky Quartet started life in Middlesbrough, UK, in 1972, only about 10 or 12 years after each of its players did, as a group of typical pre-teens with an atypical obsession with the music of Shostakovich.

Like Australia’s Goldner Quartet, they eventually adopted a name honouring an emigree who had made a profound contribution to their local musical history: Adolph Brodsky, to whom British composer Edward Elgar had dedicated his own string quartet (for the Goldner Quartet, the honoured figure was Richard Goldner, founder of Musica Viva).

There have been some personnel changes over the years – in the early noughties current SSO concertmaster Andrew Haveron was a member – but violinist Ian Belton and cellist Jacqueline Thomas have been there since the beginning, and violist Paul Cassidy since 1982. Former fellow student, violinist Krysia Osostowicz, joined post-pandemic as the quartet – like its current host, the Sydney Opera House – embarks on its sixth decade.

Their Sydney programs for the Opera House’s 50th birthday celebrations showcase the music of Bach (quartet arrangements by Paul Casssidy of Bach’s three sonatas for solo violin), Schubert and Benjamin Britten, at whose memorial concert they played in 1982.

The first two movements of Bach’s Violin Sonata in A minor, BWV 1003 constitute a pair and, after a dreamy grave, they allowed the fugue to quietly unfold with fluency and reflective grace. This flowed seamlessly, via a short cadenza from Osostowicz, to an andante of unhurried gentleness and a final allegro of balanced impetus.

Britten’s String Quartet No. 1 starts with the extraordinary sound of a celestially high chord on the top three instruments in extreme upper register over low pizzicato from cello. This gives vivid physical realisation to the sentiment expressed in Kant’s dictum that Beethoven wrote out and kept on his writing table – “the starry skies above and the moral law within”.

Though this perilous texture lost its grip in a few places, the Brodsky Quartet carved out the work’s striking individuality of utterance with deep affinity and insight.

As Osostowicz noted in pre-performance remarks, Schubert’s String Quartet In G major, D 887 takes the genre of the quartet into previously unexplored areas, its opening theme over shimmering tremelos evoking the shining other-worldly presence that Wagner strove to express at the start of his opera Lohengrin.

In the slow movement they blended shaded melancholy with Schubert’s remarkable flashes of drama. The finale danced with imperturbable buoyancy as though unsure whether to choose life or death.

Tragically, Schubert had the latter chosen for him two years later, just as he was opening such remarkable new vistas, and the Brodsky Quartet brought to it five decades of sustained insight and wisdom.

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