REVIEWS
DUDOK QUARTET String quartet
Wednesday 19 February 2025 7:30pm
Mozart – String quartet in G major, K387
Bushra El-Turk – Three Tributes for string quartet
Tchaikovsky – String quartet no. 3 in E flat minor, op 30
The Dudok Quartet Amsterdam is forging a reputation as one of the most creative and versatile quartets of its generation.They met first as members of the Ricciotti Ensemble, a Dutch street symphony orchestra, and they are committed to bringing a wide range of music to audiences. Their programme for Ilkley starts with the first and perhaps the best of Mozart’s six ‘Haydn’ quartets, a tribute to the ‘father’ of the string quartet, which culminates in perhaps the liveliest and least academic fugal movement in the repertoire.
Bushra El-Turk is a London-born composer with Lebanese roots, selected by the BBC as one of the most inspiring 100 Women of today. The Dudok premiered her Three Tributes at the end of last year, combining classical and middle-eastern folk traditions.
Tchaikovsky’s three string quartets are unjustly neglected – the third, which completes the concert, is a piece of full-blooded Romanticism written as an elegiac tribute to a close friend.
REVIEW BY Chris Skidmore
Revelatory string playing from Dutch group
The Dudok Quartet from Amsterdam won over a full King’s Hall audience last Wednesday with their distinctive and exciting playing. The upper strings, Judith van Driel and Marleen Wester (violins) and Marie-Louise de Jong (viola) stood as near as possible to the listeners, grouped around the seated cellist, David Faber, their spontaneous movement inviting us into their musicmaking.
The programme began with the first of Mozart’s ‘Haydn’ quartets, K387, a piece full of invention and extreme contrasts, of both speed and dynamics. In a revelatory performance of great delicacy and accuracy, the Dudok’s players seemed to be recreating the music as they went. The helter-skelter runs of the first movement were negotiated with panache, the skittish minuet made magical by the alternation of loud and soft, the serenity of the andante played most movingly and the fugal elements of the final allegro were made into a highlight by the practical introduction beforehand.
Lighting and recorded sound were brought into play to enhance the music in the following piece by Bushra El-Turk, a tribute to three Levantine chanteuses, commissioned and premiered by the group only last year. The astounding variety of sounds conjured from these four stringed instruments combined with occasional vocalization evoked the, to us, strange sound world of the Middle-East and drew generous applause from the audience.
The second half consisted of an equally stunning performance of the third of Tchaikovsky’s string quartets, not well known in this country. This is an impassioned piece written in memory of a violinist friend and alternating between funereal sadness and overstated jollity. The players evoked a generous sound world full of rich vibrato and, in the andante funebre, intense emotion from weeping muted strings. This memorable concert was brought to a triumphant conclusion by a contrasting encore, a transcription of one of the delightful miniatures from Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons.
