Four down, five to go.
Or 16 down, 20 to go, if we count the individual participants in the Banff International String Quartet Competition, which started Monday in the stunning surroundings of Banff National Park, and concludes Sunday with the announcement of three laureate ensembles.
It is clearly too early to play Nostradamus, but the afternoon and evening sessions on Day One in 575-seat Jenny Belzberg Theatre — the main concert hall of the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity — included some performances of prize-winning value.
You can watch the third, fourth and fifth sessions of the 21st Century Haydn Round on the via the BISQC Facebook page or The Violin Channel.
And what, you might ask, is the 21st Century Haydn Round?
Like most competitions, BISQC imposes repertoire breadth requirements. All nine competing quartets (six of them from Europe) must begin their steeplechase with a program combining a work by Joseph Haydn, the classical founder of the string quartet tradition, and a score by a 21st-century composer.
By virtue of a coincidence that beggars belief, three quartets — the Quartett HANA of Munich, the Quatuor Elmire (Paris) and the Quatuor Magenta (also Paris) — have chosen the String Quartet No. 5 (2004-2005) of the established Frenchman Pascal Dusapin as their 21st-century offering.
This means the first two groups (HANA and Elmire) performed the same toughly modern score on Monday afternoon, with no audible objection from a close-listening crowd dominated by seniors.
First of the 21st-century submissions heard in the evening was the Caroline Shaw’s Entr’acte (2011), a relatively gentle (though still inventive) piece played with pinpoint timing by the Nerida Quartet of Bremen. Much appreciated.
What really rocked the applause-o-metre, however, was the String Quartet No. 3 “Jagdquartett” (2003) of Jörg Widmann, a well-known German composer and clarinetist who transformed a “hunting” theme borrowed from Schumann’s Papillons into something resembling an avant-garde comic opera full of shouts, sword fights, and no end of extravagant extended techniques. The Viatores Quartet of Berlin played this with tremendous verve. Strange to say, the Arete Quartet of Seoul will have a go at this unusual opus Tuesday evening.
As engaging as the 21st-century selections were, they will account for only a fraction of the score assigned by the seven judges. Haydn counts for more.
The Quatuor Elmire performance of Op. 76 No. 5, and particularly its exquisite Largo movement, was the outstanding contribution in this category. With their handsome tone and attention to expressive detail, these French players strike me as potential finalists.
Still to be heard, of course, are the Quartet KAIRI of Salzburg; the Cong Quartet of Hong Kong; the aforementioned Arete and Magenta; and the Poiesis Quartet of Cincinnati — the only entrants from North America and the most outlandishly dressed, to judge by publicity photos. The Myriade Quartet from McGill University was originally announced among the Banff hopefuls, but one of the players suddenly left to fill a vacancy in another Montreal ensemble, the Quatuor Molinari.
The Banff competition runs through Sunday. You can tune into the Romantic Round, the World Premiere Round (featuring a new work by Kati Agócs), the Beethoven/Schubert + 20th Century Round (no Shostakovich, surprisingly) and the final afternoon, in which the three top ensembles vie for the first prize, which includes $25,000 in cash, a touring program and residencies at Southern Methodist University and elsewhere.
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