String Quartet in G minor - Debussy

String Quartet in F - Ravel

Concert in D for Violin, Piano and Quartet - Chausson

The Vanbrugh Quartet's Globetrotting Series went to France for its recital last Sunday in the NCH, but it also went time-travelling, back 100 years to the 1890s. The most notable feature of the music was its decadence, not its Frenchness. As in a Beardsley print, the white notes are never as pure as they seem, the black notes hint at things better concealed. The creation of atmosphere is all-important, an atmosphere of mystery in which melodies are used as signposts in the mist.

Chausson's Concert in a sonata for violin and piano with a string quartet added to make the mixture oppressively rich. As the music moved from one protracted climax to another, Anthony Marwood (violin) and Hugh Tinney (piano) sounded capable of dispensing with the quartet altogether; it wasn't that they played in a solecistic manner, they were only following the lead of the music, which has the opulence of deep velvets and glittering jewellery.

Debussy and Ravel, in comparison, are not so keen on climaxes; they are more interested in what happens between them. Their Impressionism, as it has been called, is not the breaking up of light into its prismatic components as the painters did, but a veiling of light behind screens of varying transparency. It is a very subdues Chausson but the decadent impulse is there, as the Vanbrugh Quartet made plain in their performance. Ravel's Quartet, which dates from 1904, is attempting to free itself from the miasma, but only fitfully succeeds.