Matthew Salisbury, The Leamington Observer
17 Feb 2025
A comparatively young quartet playing three very different pieces and an evening nobody who witnessed will forget for a long while.
Click here to read the fulle article on the website of The Leamington Observer
Fibonacci Quartet, Pump Rooms, Leamington
A comparatively young quartet playing three very different pieces and an evening nobody who witnessed will forget for a long while.
A strong indication of just how good this concert would be arrived right at the start. The first quartet in a programme, while never treated as anything as throwaway as a warm-up, is often a chance for the quartet to play itself in gradually.
Not so here. The Fibonaccis attacked Haydn’s Bb Sunrise Quartet as if it were a complete concert in its own right. An astonishing tonal palette and dynamics ranging from near-silent to full-on all featured before even the first movement was out.
The drawn-out cadences of the slower second movement were plain beautiful and it’s hard to imagine a quartet playing any tighter as a unit than this.
Bela Bartok’s impressively crazy Quartet No 4 provides a test of not only what a quartet is capable of, but what each individual is capable of wringing from his or her instrument.
Unsettled and unsettling it’s a piece demanding, and getting, concentration and commitment of the first order. Unbelievable speed, monstrous slides and a pizzicato movement which should not be possible – this is Bartok at his most challenging and, thanks to the mastery and aplomb of this group, his most rewarding.
A slightly tongue-in-cheek reference to Bartok’s prescient championing of heavy metal was duly played out in a final movement which, if commitment and power could be measured in shredded bow hair and impressive head-banging, was truly off the scale.
The promise of Schubert’s evergreen masterpiece Death and the Maiden will have pulled in a fair share of the audience. Never out of fashion of missing from concert programmes, this towering piece owes its popularity to the fact that it is music for the genre at its absolute best.
Many of those in the audience for this evening will have heard countless renditions of this piece before but not many could surely claim they’d heard, or indeed seen it played any better.
The Fibonacci Quartet have a cohesion in their approach and playing that many far more established ensembles would envy. The playing throughout this quartet was just sublime. The irresistible flow and harmony of the Andante was magnificent, clearly attention to detail helps but there is a shared love here which just brings all four players as close as they could get. You couldn’t fit a cigarette paper between them as they took their bows and that was true for the way they played.
Matthew Salisbury