Heavenly first class music in Leamington and Warwick

HOW lucky we are in Leamington and Warwick to enjoy the first class music many heard last weekend.

Leamington Music’s new season of International String Quartets welcomed back St Petersburg’s Atrium Quartet for their third visit. Their highly disciplined approach delivered a sublime Arensky Quartet in A and a late Shostakovich, number 11 – an example of his philosophical age towards the end of his life. Tchaikovsky number 2 in F provided Atrium the opportunity to show their supreme confidence with a work so closely linked to St Petersburg, the city where the composer died.

Atrium’s encore became the evening’s talking point - Fazil Say’s Divorce Quartet encouraging musical quarrelling between first and second violins! Sunday morning’s coffee concert with Coull offered a 1948 and, therefore, a comparatively early Shostakovich quartet composed at a time when Stalin’s decree that ‘music must appeal to the masses’, put Shostakovich and other creative artists in great fear, and, considered to be ‘enemies of the people’.

The torment he must have been suffering was hugely evident in Coull’s well received, moving and harrowing delivery.

With hardly a pause, Coull moved to Beethoven’s Quartet in F opus 18, no1 – no mean achievement, as this reflects much happier times of Beethoven’s life. Coull pay great attention to detail, Roger Coull continues to show leadership and a rhythmic alertness is evident in their playing.

And so to Sunday afternoon’s treat at the town hall with Beauchamp Sinfonietta. The main attraction is the confident conducting by Nick Fallowfield whose choice of tempi and phrasing in Fauré’s Pelléas and Mélisande was exemplary. That alone would have made for a very pleasing afternoon, however the guitar playing by Dimitris Dekavallas of works by Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Villa Lobos was of an excellent standard and quite heavenly.

To end a wonderful weekend Fallowfield led a very spirited performance of Bizet’s Symphony in C.

Clive Peacock