Homeward. The Australian String Quartet. Gandel Hall, National Gallery of Australia. Sunday, August 6 at 2pm. Tickets: $75 Concession: $60 Students:$30. asq.com.au.
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Australian String Quartet cellist Sharon Draper says, "It's been an incredibly busy year for the quartet". The current members of the quartet – Dale Barltrop, violin I, Francesca Hiew, violin II, Stephen King, viola and Draper – have been together since the beginning of 2016.
"We feel that we've hit our groove, so to speak," Draper says, "and it's just so encouraging that we seem to be getting stronger and stronger as a group and also as an organisation."
The quartet's August concert, Homeward, features works by Benjamin Britten, Paul Stanhope and Antonin Dvorak. The theme of the program is exile and return.
Caught for almost three years in the US at the beginning of World War II, Britten suffered great homesickness and yearned to return to his home on the Suffolk coast. His String Quartet No.1 in D major op 25 was commissioned by an American patron, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge and was first performed in 1941 in Los Angeles, earning the composer the Coolidge Medal for Eminent Services to Chamber Music. While Britten was somewhat cavalier about the award, he found the $400 useful.
"This piece is incredibly atmospheric," Draper says. "The opening is actually very ambiguous and starts with the three upper voices almost up in the stratosphere with a pizzicato cadenza of the cello line underneath it. It's very unusual writing but I think it immediately captivates the audience and creates this atmosphere of being lost. The slow movement has almost the feel of a requiem to it but there's also great cheekiness particularly in the scherzo movement and there's incredible rhythmic drive and force in the last movement. It finally ends in triumph."
Paul Stanhope's String Quartet No. 2 reflects on the plight of Jewish exiles as they travel from a place of fear and anguish, sustained only by hope of a better future, on a journey to Australia. This work was commissioned by Kim Williams and was premiered in 2010 when Stanhope was Musica Viva's featured composer.
"The meandering melodies can cross bar lines [so that] you don't have any idea of a sense of pulse and this creates a sort of lost and unsettled feeling," Draper says. She describes the opening dirge as having incredible pathos, "but it gradually winds up and up tempo-wise and energy-wise until the whole piece runs into a very energetic finale and finishes with a bang, one could say, quite triumphantly."
Finally the quartet moves to j Dvorak's String Quartet No. 13 in G major op. 106. Dvorak was stimulated by his three years in the US but his return to his Czech homeland was a joyous one.
"It's just like a happy ray of sunshine really," Draper says. We love this piece and we thought that it would be a fitting end to the program."
With Draper's marriage to guitarist Slava Grigoryan last December there has been an exciting extension of possibilities to play as a quintet, which happened with the quartet's last tour when two guitar quintets were played.
"Since the baroque era there hasn't been much repertoire written for guitar with string quartet," Draper says, "so it was really great that our friend Iain Grandage had written Black Dogs. Playing these relatively new works introduced a new sonority for the string quartet – the plucked effect of the guitar and the extra percussiveness and resonance. We hope that we'll play as a quintet again. But there are so many incredible Australian and international artists that we'd like to collaborate with that we have to spread it around. At present we've got some exciting plans in the pipeline for other Australian artists to join us."
