Is there a string quartet that performs Ludwig Van Beethoven's brilliant, exceptionally beautiful, extraordinarily difficult and still too rarely performed string quartets better than the Quator Ebène? Anyone who has the opportunity to hear and see the four string players perform live should not miss that chance. Klassiek Centraal was there.
For everyone and everything: thanks to 'papa' Joseph Haydn because he and no one else came up with the idea of using four string players, two violins, a viola and a cello, to entertain people with pleasant music in the salons of the Esterhazy palaces. Haydn spoke about it with his young friend Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and he learned how it should be done and how it could be better. Mozart had never had to work so hard to compose something and he dedicated six quartets to Haydn. Beethoven listened to that string music and it must have touched him very deeply. He would be inspired by both great masters, a logical step because other composers never reached that level at all.
The Quator Ebène chose the 'Streichquartett F-Dur opus 18/1'. It is considered Beethoven's first string quartet, which it is not. It would be the second one. The original manuscripts are lost, but copies from Beethoven's time still exist, although the composer may have tinkered with them. He was not immediately entirely satisfied with his work, a known phenomenon among genius artists: it is never good enough, it can be better here and there and otherwise you know… For us it is finished and nothing can be changed in any case, best Beethoven. To realize this as one of the first string quartets, only the very best can do that.
The quartet is heavily laden. That is quite understandable, Beethoven suffered enormously from his hearing problems which only got worse. He was depressed about it and would soon after think of suicide, for which he isolated himself from Vienna and wrote the poignant Heiligenstädter Testament.
The four musicians, Pierre Colombet (violin), Gabriel Le Magadure (violin), Marie Chilemme (viola) and Yuya Okamoto (cello) are perfectly attuned to each other in every conceivable way and form just one instrument. The purity, the broad bows, the legato playing so longed for and demanded by Beethoven, the exceptional balance, the poetry, the drama, the development, the phrasing, all elements that help understand the story that Beethoven tells here. His message, his heavy emotions: everything is emphasized. The quartet lets the music speak. What a listening experience. It is so unique that, to be honest, the two pieces that follow pale in the shadow of this great Beethoven.
Raphaël Merlin (1982) his latest composition for string quartet (2025) is a search between contemporary, avant-garde, classical melody and new things, but honestly, he doesn't really find his way. I might program it anyway to really give new work a chance, but it should have come before the Beethoven, just like the last piece of the evening. The third and final work was Tchaikovsky's string quartet no. 3, A work in which the composer processes some frustrations and secret love(s)?, not being able to be who he is. He is clearly also searching for something, sometimes a bit muddled, sometimes delightful. Not really a work I am won over by, but not everything has to be my piece of the pie, right?
Anyone who wants more Ebène and certainly Beethoven with them can purchase the complete oeuvre of string quartets, recorded in 2020 on the occasion of the Beethoven year, a release by Warner Classics.