Review: Dante Quartet

6th June 7.30pm at King's College Chapel. £16/£12/£5 

As I sat at the east end of King's College Chapel, surrounded by the visual loveliness bequeathed by past centuries, and listening to quite fabulous playing by the Dante Quartet and pianist Alissa Firsova, some famous words by Charles Dickens came into my mind. 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times;' he wrote at the start of A Tale of Two Cities. Had he been in the audience on Sunday he might have continued 'it was the best of concerts, it was the worst of concerts.'

As I've suggested, in terms of consistently beautiful playing, delivered with emotion and tempered by artistry, much of this concert aspired to the sublime. In works by Janacek and Dvorak there was every sign of a profound understanding of the music, with each melody uniquely characterised, and with an unclouded vision of the whole structure. Not to mention a generally glossy sound, a together attack, and a balance between strings and piano that was to die for. And yet . . .

In my view, the Dante Quartet wasted the remainder of the programme in a performance of a work that was frankly unworthy of their collective talent. Its title was 'La Divina Commedia String Quartets' and it was written in 2008 by a family of composers, Dmitri Smirnov, his wife Elena Firsova, and their daughter Alissa Firsova – the stunning pianist I've already mentioned. Of course there were no problems with any of this, especially as each of the composers had contributed a quartet appropriately reflecting the three sections of Dante's Divine Comedy – respectively Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.

But tragically this worthwhile artistic project failed to communicate anything of Dante's monumental poem. Instead we were treated to over forty minutes of sheer compositional self-indulgence. Worse still it was a kind of self-indulgence that reached its heyday in the sixties and seventies but which has been mercifully swept away in recent decades.

No, I'm not kidding – here was the tuneless music of the squeaky gate, the grunt, the yelp, and the fart, resurrected from the discredited avant-garde manual of fifty years ago! Predictably all the fingerprints from the bad old days were there – playing on the bridge, fragmentary tremolos, glissandos, aimless plucking, snatches of atonal melody, and outbursts of manic string crossing. And as with all music of this kind one looked in vain for any emotional thread or sustained musical argument.

Come on guys, this kind of stuff may have been fashionable when Boulez and Stockhausen were names to conjure with but they've long been superseded by much more accessible contemporary composers. Minimalists like Part, Tavener and Gorecki, not to mention the likes of John Rutter and Karl Jenkins, all of whom have given concert-goers tunes and tonality to relate to once again. When Dmitri Smirnov quoted and parodied a melody from Tchaikovsky's Francesca da Rimini at one point in his quartet, it kind of said everything about the way a great tune can effect the emotions and etch itself indelibly into the memory. But what could anyone take away from his own piece?

What made it all so much worse was the fantastic quality of the other two works on the programme. Dvorak's A major Piano Quintet is written from an entirely populist perspective with melodies which evoke Czech folksong and dance, but also with a logical thread which runs from beginning to end of the piece. Janacek's Violin Sonata, played with intensity and conviction by Krysia Osostowicz and Alissa Firsova, is very different. Unlike the Dvorak, it is challenging, innovative, demanding even. But every bar speaks of greatness, and even where the music is most compressed it invites repeated listening till at least some of its mysteries are revealed. 

As if the inclusion of the new work wasn't bad enough, each item on the programme was prefaced by some gratuitous poetry by Anna Akhmatova. Please! Isn't it common knowledge that the music says it all?