Reviews

The Guardian

17 June 2017

The beauty of the piece, for tenor and string quartet, is its restraint. It doesn’t sensationalise, get maudlin, moralise or politicise. The words are direct and the music respects that. The performance does, too: clear, focused playing from the Sacconi Quartet and lucid, unswerving narrative from tenor Mark Padmore. The rest of the disc is lighter but always with that trademark Dove economy: the Sacconis sound relaxed and bubbly in the 2001 quartet Out of Time and pianist Charles Owen joins for the Piano Quintet, intense and light-filled.

KATE MOLLESON, The Guardian, June 2017

The Scotsman

1 November 2016

Music review: Sound Festival, Aberdeen

...All change, though, for Saturday’s lunchtime concert from the UK-based Sacconi Quartet and harpist Ruth Wall (*****), which included the world premiere of a sound-commissioned, bracingly energetic new work from UK post-minimalist Graham Fitkin. Recur for string quartet and harp was a gem of a piece, sparkling with plucked textures, its four-note earworm of a tune cast in endlessly inventive new contexts, funky and foot-tapping yet also full of piquant emotion, and it got a crisp, bright, thoroughly assured premiere performance.

DAVID KETTLE, The Scotsman, November 2016

The Observer

4 September 2016

String quartets stand out for different reasons, from quality of sound (the Takács or, in the past, the Alban Berg or Amadeus) to adventurous repertoire (Kronos or Arditti or JACK) to versatility, among whom the Sacconi Quartet, currently celebrating their 15th anniversary this year, are front-runners. They have a festival, work with a wide range of musicians and actors and have their own label. They are also very good. The works here, typically, are carefully matched: Mendelssohn wrote his mighty A minor quartet Op 13 in response to Beethoven’s in A minor, Op 132. The playing is fresh and pliable, each work illuminating the other. Both have been widely recorded, but not together. Assuming you’re not a completist, that’s reason enough to snap up this disc.

Fiona Maddocks, The Observer, September 2016

The Guardian

14 July 2016

Jonathan Dove’s new work, which received its first London performance in this 15th anniversary concert by the Sacconi Quartet, is an unusual and timely one. Scored for tenor and string quartet, it sets English translations by Anne-Marie McManus of text from the Syrian poet Ali Safar’s A Black Cloud in a Leaden White Sky, or Death by Stabs of Sorrow.

Safar and McManus have distilled elements of the tragic Syrian experience into words that are simple, direct and without any hint of rhetoric or sensation. Dove has succeeded in setting them to music that allows their plainness and understatement to register to maximum effect while maintaining a striking character of its own.

The string writing moves back and forth between painful intensity and frozen introspection, with many subtle shades in between. The tenor line – here presented by Mark Padmore with immaculate artistry, and a technique so finely honed that one scarcely noticed it – amplifies the eloquent candour of the originals.

The overall impact of the work and its performance was profound, an unforgettable example of the power of art to convey something terrible through an expression that is paradoxically in itself beautiful.

Dove’s piece took up the entire second half. The Sacconis led up to it with an account of Mozart’s Hoffmeister Quartet in which their fine balance and near flawless ensemble provided the bedrock for a graceful yet rhythmically vital interpretation; and a performance of Mendelssohn’s great F minor Quartet whose fury and ferocity set the scene for what was to come.

George Hall, The Guardian, July 2016

British Sibelius Society

23 July 2015

This performance by the Sacconi Quartet of Sibelius's 'Voces intimae' was the finest I have ever heard. First up was his Moderato and Allegro appassionato (1888-89), and Nielsen, his First String Quartet (1887-88). Therefore we heard two contemporary Nordic composers, both born in 1865, writing music for string quartet in the same period of their careers. The juxtaposition was highly revealing.

The Sibelius is an ambitious, full length sonata-form movement. The Moderato is barely a few bars long before an impassioned theme begins on the first violin. Mendelssohn is immediately bought to mind, but Sibelius is flexing his musical muscles with great success. Sibelius had been nurtured on Classical (Haydn and Beethoven) and Romantic (the usual suspects) models, all of whose music he played as a violinist in a quartet. He had yet to seek, let alone, define a musical style that identified with any Finnish characteristics.

Nielsen's First String Quartet provided a complete contrast to the Sibelius and is imbued with a strong Scandinavian flavour; the delightful Trio in the third movement demonstrates fiddle folk-music to perfection. The gorgeous slow movement is a clear harbinger of the First Symphony completed in 1892. The Sacconi players were most impressive. The Sibelius surged forward and the Nielsen was well integrated, the sense of an emerging national composer fully established.

Both the early Sibelius and the Nielsen works are impressive examples of interest and compositional ability. Each composer was subsequently to write four String Quartets, the last of these the greatest by far, Sibelius's 'Voces intimae', written (largely in London) in 1909. Sibelius was struggling to come to terms with his mortality following a series of painful attempts to remove a cancerous growth from his throat. This String Quartet heralds entry into an extreme period of introspection for the composer already afflicted with a depressive, obsessive personality.

The Sacconi Quartet, confronted with music with wild mood-swings, was supremely successful in combining the contrasts of human feeling, and totally authentic. Sibelius was suffering and so were we, and this was a truly magisterial, full-bloodied and deeply thoughtful view a masterpiece. The first movement was portrayed initially as a beautiful prelude, containing an opening sadness but ending with the bone-crunching final chords that was truly unnerving.

The brief Vivace second movement was as light as a feather and as swift as a pedigree racehorse, providing welcome relief. Then the musicians confronted mortality in the expansive Adagio di molto, often likened to late Beethoven, and this rendering certainly placed the reflective inspiration of Sibelius on a par with the German master. The three hushed E-minor chords in bars 21 and 22, over which Sibelius wrote 'Voces intimae', were played with spellbinding delicacy.

The fourth movement, a sort of country dance, here became a kind of obsessive ritual, the players combining and departing from each other in wild fury. The Finale generated, by careful adherence to the markings for gradual acceleration, a release from the spine-tingling sensations of the earlier movements. Instead of the usual rush to the close, heard in many accounts, the Sacconi delighted in interaction. The flourish at the very end relieved the often-dark-spiritual journey heard earlier: near-perfection was achieved.

Edward Clark
President of the British Sibelius Society

The Guardian & The Observer

13 July 2015

If you are in London on Tuesday evening and in the mood to hear a surprising rarity, head for the Purcell Room. The Sacconi Quartet will be playing the London premiere of a youthful Sibelius piece, his Moderato and Allegro Appassionata in C sharp minor. It has never been published, so the quartet had to apply to the composer’s estate for the manuscript. It’s a wonderfully engaging piece, despite its brow-furrowing key. Fretful and anxious, it bursts with youthful impetuosity, never quite able to take itself entirely seriously – a lyrical pastoral, based around a single rising theme but with dark clouds never far away.

The Sacconis are currently in residence at the Lichfield festival, where they played this piece as an opener to an afternoon of Nordic brooding. They displayed tremendous control in the febrile intensity of the first movement of Nielsen’s Quartet in G minor, Op 13, before slipping into the calmer waters of the second movement, with particularly fine playing from second violinist Hannah Dawson. The bucolic third movement opened with such savage urgency that the audience visibly flinched, but it was in Sibelius’s Intimate Voices quartet that the Sacconis really impressed. The calm stillness of the central adagio will linger in the memory for a long time. It was a triumphant performance...

Stephen Pritchard,
The Guardian & The Observer

The Birmingham Post

13 July 2015

Is it really 22 years since The Juliet Letters? In 1993, we mistook it for crossover: there was a lot of it about back then. Elvis Costello’s song cycle with the Brodsky Quartet seemed to follow in the tradition of George Martin’s quartet arrangements for the Beatles, or Sinatra’s recordings with the Hollywood Quartet. But crucially, The Juliet Letters comprised entirely original music: the joint product of Costello’s art as a songwriter and the creative instincts of the individual Brodskys. The result?

Well, as we discovered in this late night Lichfield Festival concert with Jon Boden and the Sacconi Quartet the result was something that, two decades on, requires neither Costello nor the Brodskys in order to make a powerful impact. Inevitably, there were glitches: microphones never sit easily with chamber groups. Costello aficionados hoping to hear a slick reproduction of the studio album will have been disappointed.

For the rest of us, though, the rough edges made this music speak more directly – more passionately – than ever. Not that Boden’s light, softly-shaded tenor wasn’t ideally suited to the Sondheim-esque wit of numbers like Romeo’s Seance and This Offer is Unrepeatable. 

But Boden and the Sacconis played off each other, seeming to find a shared intensity in the searching, Berg-like Dear Sweet Filthy World, making tone-colour match curdling harmonies, and transforming I Thought I’d Write To Juliet into a miniature music-drama. Boden’s expression as Robin Ashwell’s viola solo in Last Post sobbed out into the vast space of the darkened cathedral said it all: this was chamber music of a high order.

Richard Bratby, 
The Birmingham Post