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Review: Fine Arts Quartet ****
Over the next six months, the Leeds International Concert Season will explore Russian music of the 20th century in a series of chamber music concerts brought together by the pianist, Dmitri Alexeev, and presented in The Venue.
It opened with a minor revelation in Rachmaninov's rarely performed First String Quartet. Composed when he was 17, and owing everything to Tchaikovsky, its two contrasting movements ending with a delightful scherzo. It was performed by the legendary Fine Arts Quartet. that was formed in Chicago in 1946, three of its present members being together for 25 years.
In style it is a throwback to quartets of yesteryear where the leader, Ralph Evans, is the dominant factor, the other members providing inner voices that come to the fore in solo passages.
Shostakovich's Eighth Quartet, composed to "the victims of fascism and war", found them tearing into the frenetic second movement with total abandonment, but it was their creation of the work's chilling feeling of desolation that was the memorable aspect.
Alexeev joined them in Dvorak's opus 81 Piano Quintet that drew an ecstatic response from the audience, though there were things to be desired in terms of pure accuracy.
The Venue, Leeds
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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