On Tuesday, April 2, 2024, the Signum Quartet played their first concert in Vancouver for Friends of Chamber Music. For the second Tuesday in a row, we were introduced to a German quartet playing for us for the first time. There are some intriguing elements to compare between the Signum string Quartet who played this last week and the Fauré piano Quartett who played a week earlier.
To my ears, the Fauré brought us a more Romantic sweep to their interpretations, while maintaining a care for detail and structure. By contrast, the Signum gave a more classicist and paradoxically modernist sound, combining a steely and laser-like precision in timbre with high energy, but also gave a well-measured balance and structure to the music. The Signum’s style makes the group a fine interpreter of Franz Schubert’s music, leaning toward the Classical rather than the Romantic perspective of his oeuvre. And yet, despite being more Classical, the Signum’s version of the music still has an emotional pull and Schubert’s songlike melodies flow throughout.
Schubert’s music was the line reaching through the concert, starting with violist Xandi van Dijk’s arrangement of the song, “Auf dem Wasser zu singen”, (“To sing on the water”), D.774. The ensemble’s concert-time addition was Schubert’s single movement String Quartet No. 12 in C minor, D.703 “Quartettsatz”. The players brought out the tension and the longing in this cool and beautifully blended rendition, the first live version for us since 2009 when played by the “historically informed performance” (and very differently Classical sounding) ensemble, Quatuor Mosaiques.
In the next piece, the musicians gave us something completely different. “(rage) rage against the” (2018) is music by South African violinist and composer Matthijs van Dijk, Signum violist Xandi’s brother. A thoroughly modern work, the music is inspired by the line from Dylan Thomas’ poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night”. And the music, while filled with wild jumps in dynamics and strange contrasts, is emotionally and structurally intense. The Signum Quartet played this music with magnificent technique, exhibiting care for both delicate detail and the brutal power in fortissimo sections. This is powerfully confrontational music, and it seemed to divide our audience into expressing shock and delighted excitement. After that, Edwin Schulhoff’s “Five Pieces for String Quartet” may have sounded less demanding on the ears, but was nonetheless exquisitely played. This modernist dance suite by the composer who perished in a Nazi death camp is now almost a century old, but still feels fresh, and on this night proved to be an audience favourite.
Following the intermission, the Signum launched the second half with Schubert’s Quartet No. 1, D18, a teenage work that has some satisfying elements, but mostly illustrates the craft skills that the mature composer, who died at age 31, would develop in his short life.
The second half continued with the brief transcribed Waltz by author Leo Tolstoy, serving as a prelude to Leoš Janáček’s String Quartet No. 1 “Kreutzer Sonata”. Janáček’s string quartet is the composer’s interpretation of Tolstoy’s story of two people rehearsing Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” violin sonata. The Signum performance was wonderfully balanced, following a structural and emotional arc across the work with great power and delicacy.
The audience’s enthusiastic ovation that followed this music brought the musicians back to the stage for a final Schubert encore, another song arrangement for string quartet by Xandi van Dijk, “Du bist die Ruh”, D776.
