By Nancy Plum
The London-based and award-winning Marmen String Quartet came to Richardson Auditorium last week as part of Princeton University Concerts’ Classics Series. In a performance full of originality and youth, the Marmen players proved why they have achieved great acclaim in the short thirteen years since the Quartet’s founding.
In Thursday night’s program, violinists Johannes Marmen and Laia Valentin Braun, violist Bryony Gibson-Cornish, and cellist Sinéad O’Halloran found a connection between the sunniness of Franz Joseph Haydn’s String Quartet in B-flat Major and their own inventive approach to performing. The first movement of Haydn’s “Sunrise” Quartet captured the warmth of a morning sky, with the fits and starts of a dawn trying to break. First violinist Marmen lyrically played the opening melody against the intimate backdrop of second violin, viola, and cello. The ensemble sound gelled well amidst the changing tempi and styles of Haydn’s music, with teasing cadences well tapered. Throughout the work, cellist O’Halloran showed herself to be a particularly animated and entertaining player to watch, and Marmen and Braun expertly handled Haydn’s technical demands.
The third movement was a saucy minuet, with the two violins playing over drone-like passages resembling bagpipes from the lower strings. Phrases consistently ended together in the fourth movement, as the Marmen musicians brought Haydn’s Quartet to a close with a flourish, showing refinement and flair.
It would be hard to identify a composer from the early decades of the 20th century who was not significantly affected by World War I, and Hungarian Béla Bartók was no exception. Bartók continued to compose during the war, infusing his music with trademark folk idioms, even though his research and travel had come to a halt. String Quartet No. 2 in A Minor, dating from 1917, combined folk influences from Bartók’s journeys with his emotional string writing. Violist Bryony Gibson-Cornish figured prominently in this Quartet, carrying much of the melodic material in an unsettled first movement. Bartók structured the Quartet contrary to traditional form, placing a fast section between two movements and incorporating moments of silence into the final “Lento” to convey tragedy.
The String Quartet also featured scales and intervals evoking police and air-raid sirens, as well as jarring and driving rhythms depicting battle. O’Halloran provided both poignancy and jagged melodic lines against tense accompaniment. In the tragic closing movement, the violinists deliberately muted their instruments to create a darker sound, emphasizing the meditativeness of the piece.
Early in her career, Canadian Cassandra Miller offered her fans an unusual way to participate in her craft — by purchasing the opportunity to compose bars of music to be used in future works. One of the respondents was a fiddler, whose melody Miller incorporated into the 2011 Leaving for string quartet. In Miller’s setting, Marmen and Braun brought the folklike melody to life against a spacious instrumental palette, creating an appealing texture reflecting Canada’s open landscape.
The French composer Claude Debussy deliberately fought the musical traditionalism of the late 19th century, looking outside the norm for inspiration. As played by the Marmen Quartet, String Quartet in G Minor, Debussy’s only piece in the genre, began conventionally as the players toyed with dynamics, but quickly demonstrated his novel compositional style. Marmen and Braun often played succinctly together, with O’Halloran providing a solid foundation. Gibson-Cornish played a frenetic version of the principal theme in the second movement under clean pizzicato from the rest of the strings. The Marmen Quartet cleanly played the fugue-like closing movement, affirming that Princeton University Concerts made a wise decision in adding the ensemble’s “distinctive new voice” to the series’ “quartet family.”
Princeton University Concerts will present mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato and the ground-breaking trio Time for Three on February 22 at 3 p.m. at Richardson Auditorium. The program will include the New Jersey premiere of “Emily–No Prisoner Be,” a semi-staged song cycle by Kevin Puts inspired by the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Ticket information can be obtained by visiting concerts.princeton.edu.