On Sunday, March 2, 2025, during a warm, spring-like afternoon, the acclaimed young Berlin-based Notos Quartett played a wonderful concert for Friends at the Vancouver Playhouse. This piano quartet is comprised of violinist Sindri Lederer, violist Andrea Burger, cellist Benjamin Lai, and pianist Antonia Köster. All of us present enjoyed a gorgeously musical range of repertoire in the group’s Canadian debut performance!
The Notos Quartett has established itself by giving superlative interpretations of the great masterworks of piano quartet literature, while also championing new works and rediscovering lost and neglected pieces in this genre of chamber music. The musicians started their sunny Sunday concert with a beautifully warm and balanced approach to Mozart’s Quartet for Piano and Strings in E-flat Major, K 493. This mature example of Mozart’s art brings singing melodies and skipping rhythms to delight listeners, and the Notos contributed a rich, rounded tone to this elegant, Classical music. This was a delicious start to the concert.
By contrast, the artists turned next to English composer William Walton’s almost unknown Piano Quartet in D Minor, first written when the composer was 16 years old and revised several years later for a first performance in 1924. This piano quartet is not too far from the sound of Walton’s almost-surrealist Façade, which works with the Sitwell’s similarly strange poems, rather than his later more fulsome, neo-Romantic score for actor-director Laurence Olivier’s movie of Shakespeare’s Henry V. It brings echoes of Debussy, post-Impressionism, even late Romantic music, but undercut with rapid time signature changes and other modern music twists to subvert many of those traditions. The music is taut, passionate, and then, by turns, cool. The musicians had a powerful, unified vision of this music, giving us a passionate and wildly dynamic entry into a work that was new to all of us. How could this help but be a high point of the afternoon?
After the intermission, the Notos Quartett returned to the stage for a performance of Robert Schumann’s very Romantic Piano Quartet in E-flat Major, Opus 47 (the same key as the Mozart work on the programme). As they had done in the other two pieces of music on the programme, the musicians instantly slipped into an idiomatic interpretation of this music to fit the style of the composer and his time in history. This was a dreamy but exciting version of Schumann’s intricately satisfying music and its pointed rhythms, exemplified in the passion and melodic beauty we heard in the Andante cantabile third movement.
The youthful energy and clearly mature mastery of the Quartett members, as well as their finely blended sound, were wholly persuasive throughout the afternoon, in each style of music that they played. And the closing notes of the Schumann music resulted in a reflective pause before our audience gave these musicians a deserved standing ovation. In answer to the “bravos”, the group gave us a brief encore – in yet another musical style. This was a touching and poignant chamber music reduction of an excerpt from Dmitri Shostakovich’s orchestral suite/movie score for “The Gadfly”. Yet another emotional and musical jewel, but of a completely different colour and shape than the other musical jewels offered to us during this concert.
As people were leaving the Playhouse lobby, we heard variations on a theme of comments: “please bring this group back again soon.” We take these comments from our musically knowledgeable audience members as a strong measure of success for the Notos Quartett’s Canadian debut!
And only two weeks from Sunday, March 16, 2025, we look forward to welcoming back another group that is popular with our audience – and with audiences around the globe: the Pavel Haas Quartet. Join us for what will be adventures in fabulous music by Dvořák, Korngold, and Martinů, played by a celebrated ensemble, whose musicians understand it intimately, from the inside out.
