Stockbridge Music hosted the Tippett Quartet on Friday September 27, and a full audience in St Peter’s Church were treated to a programme of string quartets by Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven, dating from late 18th century to early 19th century.

When Mozart wrote the quartet in C major towards the end of 1772 he was not yet 17 years old, and was already leading a hectic life of composing, performing and travelling.  At the time he was making his third visit to Italy, where he was to open the winter opera season in Milan with Lucio Silla, his third opera premier in Milan in three years.  The quartets which make up the set of six are in three movements, in the Italian tradition, and with their melodic invention and melodies point the way to the quartets of Mozart’s maturity, when he returned to the form in the last decade of his life.

Schubert’s ‘Rosamunde’ quartet dates from 1824, one of two which for their slow movements draw on melodies that the composer adapted from music he had already written.  He had provided incidental music for the play Rosamunde in the previous year, and in the companion quartet used his song ‘Death and the Maiden’:  this would not be published until his early death four years later, and both quartets were written in the shadow of advancing ill health.

After the interval we heard the first of Beethoven’s well-known ‘Rasumovsky’ quartets.  By contrast with the early work of Mozart and the late work of Schubert, this was written at the time, 1806, when Beethoven was approaching mid-career, and taking the musical forms he worked with to new heights.  He had published a set of six quartets in 1801, and these can be understood in terms of the tradition established by. Haydn and developed by Mozart.  The ‘Rasumovsky’ quartets move forward in a single leap in terms of invention, scale and substance:  Beethoven was pushing to the limits the possibilities of the forms he worked with.  This was the period of the ground-breaking Eroica symphony, the fourth piano concerto and the ‘Appassionata’ piano sonata.  Music, it now seems, would never be the same again.

The Tippetts tackled this group of quartets with assurance and style. This was particularly the case with their commanding performance of the Beethoven quartet, with which they are intimately familiar.  The whole concert was warmly received, and Stockbridge is lucky to have this concert series, with its international artists, so accessible to them.  The final concert of the year will be given by the soprano Natalie Benjamin, who is currently starring (no other word is sufficient for this artist) as Mimì in Puccini’s La bohème with English National Opera:  we look forward to hearing her on Friday November 8.