Concert review: Signum Quartet at the Schwetzingen Festival

With four concerts in as many days (of which I unfortunately could only catch two), the Signum Quartet was resident ensemble at this year’s Schwetzingen Festival, a four-week event run by the broadcaster SWR. On 30 April at Schwetzingen Palace’s Mozartsaal, the Signum presented a programme centred on ‘Leoš Janáček’s great love’. As is the group’s wont, the main musical offerings – both Janáček quartets and the only one written by his short-lived compatriot, Vítězslava Kaprálová – were effectively framed by miniatures by both composers, idiomatically arranged by the Signum’s violist, Xandi van Dijk. Some of them are just a few seconds long, but Janáček’s aphorisms convey most movingly his love for Kamila Stösslová; one titled ‘All the rainbow’s colours’, from an album he compiled for her, hauntingly sticks in the mind.

The Signum players boldly unleashed the Expressionistic rawness of Janáček’s main works, unafraid of harsh sul ponticello screaming in, say, the Con moto third movement of the ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ Quartet. With sprightly tempos, the various ostinato figures obsessively reflected the two quartets’ programmatic traits, uncompromisingly realised by leader Florian Donderer’s outbursts high on the G string. Kaprálová’s piece, written in 1935, is audibly a Czech child of its time, with faint echoes of Pavel Haas and Erwin Schulhoff imbuing the composer’s individual style.

On 2 May an afternoon pop-up concert in a courtyard across the street from the Schwetzingen Palace saw the Signum presenting a cross-section of its multifarious repertoire. In another van Dijk arrangement, the Schubert song ‘Die Götter Griechenlands’ opened the wide-ranging proceedings, which included items as varied as the Kinks’ ‘You really got me’ and Dizu Plaatjies’s 21:30 (from the group’s latest project centred on South African music) alongside more central repertoire in the shape of individual movements by Haydn and Dvořák. The musicians’ charming introductions to each work were all of a piece with their engaging readings of the music.

CARLOS MARÍA SOLARE