Consone Quartet, Music in the Round, Sheffield Crucible – 10/2/26

C Schumann (Arr. Tress) Three Romances; Mozart String Quartet in C ‘Dissonance’; Schubert String Quartet No.13 ‘Rosamunde’

The Corsone Quartet I thought I’d heard before and a bit of digging around my memory and the internet reminded me that I had heard them play some Mendelssohn chamber music in Sheffield about 18 months ago, and that they’re a period instrument group, playing with gut strings.

The programme was quite an interesting one, perhaps playing with the idea of what defines a Romantic piece – to what extent is the Clara Schumann piece ‘Romantic’ or just a piece of sentimental salon music? To what extent is the Mozart piece ‘Romantic’ though thirty years before ‘romantic’ music began to come to the fore with Beethoven and Schubert? And to what extent is the Schubert ‘Romantic’, beyond its Winterreise-like first movement, full of pain and longing? Perhaps the answer is that the word usefully describes the general form and shape of music in a given period of time but that each work of a master (or mistress) has its own reality which can , and perhaps should, over-ride generic characteristics……

Somehow, though, these performances didn’t quite take off for me – which could be more to do with my mood and state of well-being as opposed to anything objectively to do with the musicians and their performances. Somehow I didn’t feel that the Mozart was given enough character, enough liveliness, enough – so to say – thought between the notes in the slow movement or the finale, though the ‘dissonant’ prelude worked very well on the bright rasping gut strings. The Schubert work’s first and second movements were very well played and characterised, but tension and variation seemed to sag and then disappear in the last two movements (which in the finale I suspect is Schubert’s fault).

I listened the next day to my recordings of these two pieces – the Emerson Quartet performing the Schubert, the Suske Quartet playing the Mozart, and found much more colour in both performances. Strange that I should have had such a down on these excellent performers (though the Sheffield MITR audience at the Crucible wasn’t as vociferously enthusiastic at the end as it sometimes is)

What did work well were the Clara Schumann pieces, adapted from a violin and piano set. They were straightforward, tuneful and unpretentious and were well played by the quartet