Choosing the music festival with the most picturesque setting is a tough call, but in the UK at least a leading contender must be the Bradfield Festival, a week of chamber music in the atmospheric location of St Nicholas Church, High Bradfield, on the outskirts of Sheffield. The acoustics are perfect, the view across the churchyard as the setting sun casts mellow shadows across the neighbouring fields is idyllic, and if the church pews appear to have been carved out of medieval instruments of torture and still have some ‘muscle memory’ of their previous existence, well, you just have to remember to bring some cushions. (Full disclosure: as Bachtrack reviewer, I was given a place in one of the posh seats, and very nice it was too.)
The Brodsky Quartet also clearly like it here, as they were on a return visit. To the three lower voices who have been together since turning professional in 1982 – two of them being present from the very beginning ten years before that – they have added the first violin of Krysia Osostowicz (with her years of experience with the Dante Quartet, Endymion Ensemble and Domus), and the result is an ensemble that breathes as one, as they showed most compellingly in Shostakovich’s String Quartet no. 3 in F major, the biggest work on the programme. This overlooked masterpiece spans the sort of emotional range in its five-movement structure (like the Piano Quintet and the Eighth Symphony) that takes us from innocence – though when is the mask-wearing Shostakovich every truly ‘innocent’? – through extreme violence to an enigmatic, part weary, part consoling conclusion. This performance was perfectly judged throughout; after the sour wit of the sardonic waltz of the second movement, all four players relished the bitterness and aggression of the following Allegro non troppo, before the passacaglia fourth movement wept funereally. Then, as Shostakovich’s programmatic movement titles (withdrawn almost instantly after the first performance) indicate, the last movement asks “The eternal question: why? and for what?” This impeccable performance trod a perfect line between peace and pain at the end and was followed by several seconds of stunned silence from an audience scarcely daring to breathe.
The Shostakovich was prefaced by a touching performance of James MacMillan’s tender elegy For Sonny. By introducing it with a request for there to be no applause between the two pieces, Osostowicz explicitly connected private mourning for the death of a tiny child to the public horrors of war and Stalinist terror in Soviet Russia, and reminded us all of the ties binding it to the harrowing experience of life and death in contemporary Ukraine. It is to the MacMillan miniature’s credit that the context by no means overwhelmed it.
After the interval the Brodskys were on less traumatic ground with the precision-tooled jewel which is Ravel’s String Quartet in F major. If Stravinsky’s quip that “Good composers borrow... but great ones steal” flags up Ravel’s evident debt to Debussy's quartet, surely it is what one does with the ‘theft’ that matters. The pieces have obvious points in common, but the inscrutable classicism of Ravel’s work was what the Brodskys pointed up most compellingly. The result was a performance that shimmered in its opening movement, toyed playfully with Spanish guitar textures in its lively second, but found its heart in the flutteringly nocturnal third movement. The driving 5/8 rhythm of the finale concluded the concert in a rush of joy, though there was still time for the exquisite bon-bon of the quartet’s arrangement of Debussy’s art song Beau soir. A perfect end to a perfect concert.
