Crisanterni - Puccini

String Quartet No. 17 in D - Donizetti

String Quartet in E minor - Verdi

Not all string quartets submit gracefully to being arranged for string orchestra, for along with the increased sonority goes a coarsening of texture. To judge by Sunday's concert at IMMA, only the quartet by Verdi was built strongly enough to withstand the broadening of effects. The work has a strong forward sweep in which subtleties do not have the same importance as in the works by Puccini and Donizetti, for all that Puccini borrowed themes from Crisanterni for Manon Lescaut. If he had arranged, or better, rewritten Crisanterni himself, it might have been a worthy addition to the string orchestra repertoire, but in the event more turned out to be less. One questions the wisdom of giving a whole programme to arrangements.

Jean-Jacques Kantorow and the ICO revelled in the dramatic contrasts of the Verdi and it would not be hard to contrive a libretto for such music - the reverse of the normal procedure - with a tender aria in the third movement to replace the cello, here admirably played by Bill Butt.

Donizetti wrote 18 string quartets but if he had not become famous as a composer of operas (he wrote 65 of them) it is unlikely that his quartets would have been exhumed, except as a historical curiosity. Kantorow gave it a fictive life but the blood never began to flow.