Concert review: Arcadia Quartet

Founded in Cluj, long based in Galway, the Arcadia Quartet has a 20-year history with only a single change of personnel in that time. To open this Coffee Concert, the ‘Dissonance’ Quartet of Mozart drew on that maturity and shared experience, in the gravity and the carefully weighted pathos of its celebrated introduction.

The Arcadia retains, all the same, the transparent warmth of a classic middle-European quartet sound. Hungarian is the first language of Cluj, not Romanian, and the Arcadia’s inquisitive attention to the shape and the meaning of each gesture in the main Allegro brought the Mozartian coaching of György Kurtág to mind. The dislocated phrases of the Minuet – Mozart at his most Haydnesque – made their point without overemphasis.

In the Arcadia’s account of Grieg’s G minor Quartet op.27 we were reminded of Mozart’s pathos when writing in the same key. Late Schubert cast an even darker shadow over the outer movements’ driven intensity, as though Grieg were striving to answer those critics who had him down as a miniaturist.

Striving, if not always succeeding: the breadth of the quartet – almost 40 minutes here, with all repeats – relies less on organic Brahmsian development than Ibsen-like dialogue and scene-setting. Violist Traian Boală excelled in the avuncular, fireside feeling of his solo to set the tone for the second movement, and the tender, hesitant return to that mood later on, led by the well-matched violins of Ana Török and Răsvan Dumitru, caught the ear and the heart.

PETER QUANTRILL