The odor of coffee tree, and a Haydn quartet: hard not to feel that the first daybreak chamber concert of the Edinburgh International festival was offering an oasis of civilisation in an otherwise chaotic city. The Ysa�e Quartet too supplied music to stir up the einstein up. Even the Haydn was unlawful: the C major Quartet, Op 54 No 2, which, with its through-composed middle movements and slow, serene closing curtain, subverts the usual classical pattern.
For most, nevertheless, the find will have been Szymanowski's Quartet No 2, written in 1927. Its endorsement and third base movements register the composer in proudly Polish mode: the former is a rough-edged dance driven as if by clockwork, the latter grows out of a contemplative folk-like psychogenic fugue. But the first effort is the most intriguing. It begins with a whispered, poker-faced buzz from the inner instruments, spell the low gear violin and cello tissue an angular melody or so them, and nods simultaneously towards the soft-grained textures of French impressionism and the blunt emotionality of German expressionism; perhaps the two are not so far apart.
Warm-toned in the Haydn, mercurially vivid in the Szymanowski, the players became benign automatons for Stravinsky's Three Pieces, putting a stop on almost all vibrato; these spare slight pieces seemed to deal the clockwork aspect of the Szymanowski to its logical conclusion.
Last came Debussy's Quartet, inevitably a signature work for any French tout ensemble, particularly one and only that shares a name with the work's creators (the original Ysa�e Quartet gave the premiere in 1893). From the impatient opening, through the seamlessly turning cycles of the second move to a finale that seemed a whistlestop retrospective of all that had gone earlier, this was a riveting performance.
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