Simon Jenner July 17th 2024
The deeply experienced Hammig String Quartet have been around 35 years and it shows in the best sense in their current line-up. Today, joined by pianist Clare Wibberley they gave a performance at St Nicholas of the Dvorak Piano Quintet No, 2 in A major Op 81.
The First I should add, Op 5 has only relatively recently emerged. This is the Dvorak Piano Quintet, one of the greatest, certainly most melodious.
The Hemmig (named after violin maker Wilhelm Hemmig, 1838-1925) now consists of Sarah Culley and David Burton on violins, Jane Tyler viola, Sean Turpin, cello.
The Dvorak is one of the most apparently uncomplicated chamber pieces around too, without either thematic baggage, a troublesome gestation, critical reception, or personal backstory. All these things attend but at a subliminal level and the work is an uninterrupted melodic chain-reaction from start to finish.
Written in less than two months between August and October 1887, it was premiered the following January and stayed in the repertoire for going on 140 years. Dvorak had been attempting to revise that earlier Piano Quintet, also in A major, from 1873, but then wrote this afterwards.
The first two movements Allegro, ma non tanto and the Czech slow dance or Dumka, an Andante con moto, both take about 14 minutes. Whilst the Hemmigs take this at a relatively even pace – it took a little over the average of 40 minutes – it’s Wibberley who really drives the performance forward in the Allegro, full of bright contrasts. The remarkable melodic construction hints at but never quotes folk tunes. Then suddenly the sunlight glints and all becomes quite timeless in the extraordinary piano-led, four-note melody of the Dumka.
Wibberley handles this with rapt concentration and a remarkable touch, aided by the church’s acoustic bloom. Wibberley’s sonance is quite special: a pinging, crystalline brightness that yet expands here, and illuminates this music. Elegy, yet somehow meditative joy too, imbues the unwinding, almost lento-like motion of this movement.
All instruments are shown to advantage, though the heat perhaps distorted them a little a and very small intonation issues filtered throughout. There’s a lot more interplay with strings and piano in the Schubertian Scherzo, or Furiant, that owns elements of the Landler in it, not that Dvorak might have entirely wished for such a Viennese comparison. But Schubert’s there (he often is to a small degree, but here insistently). It’s quite a brief four-minute movement normally, here stretched persuasively over about six.
The Allegro finale lasting nine minutes drives more complexity and allows the Hemmigs as well as Wibberley to shine in music of purpose and thew. It shimmers with the kind of fierce joy this ensemble bring to the work themselves a it ravels up themes and bursts through to an exhilarating folk-like close; and one can’t imagine a more Dvorakian performance this far west of Prague. Throroughly recommended.
St Nicholas Hammig String Quartet with Clare Wibberley, St Nicholas
Throroughly recommended.
Hammig String Quartet with Clare Wibberley
St Nicholas Church, Dyke Road, Brighton
The Hammig String Quartet joined by pianist Clare Wibberley they gave a performance at St Nicholas of the Dvorak Piano Quintet No, 2 in A major Op 81. Thoroughly recommended.