Carducci Quartet

FRANK CLIFF

The Cut,Halesworth

A link with Aldeborough Productions has proved quite a coup for New Cut Arts, seeing the establishment of afternoon recitals by young artists participating in the Aldeborough Residency.

Despite the winter's cold there was a good sized audience for the Carducci Quartet performing here the day before they appear at Aldeborough's Jubilee Hall.

Standards these days are invariably high, yet it is not often one hears a quartet which has such a strong musical personality as the Carducci.

Their sound is rich and vibrant, the quartet is well balanced with excellent technique and, above all, they have that rare ability to make a performance sound spontaneous.

The latter may involve some risk taking, but in Haydn's Opus 50, No.6, a work which fully emancipates all the instruments and contains especially virtuosic writing for first violin, nothing detracted from the excitement of their music making.

To a large extent this could also be said of their performance of the Ravel quarter, a fine reading which captured all the vitality of this magical score if not quite all its poetry.

There were occasions when they didn't quite reveal the subtlety of Ravel's scoring - the magical opening of the work, the beginning of the slow movement.

Even so, a fine performance and justly received with rapturous applause.