On the few occasions when composer Mark-Anthony Turnage has turned to the string quartet, it has usually been as a vehicle to express grief or despair. His latest, Shroud – given its UK premiere as part of the Emerson Quartet’s 40th anniversary Wigmore Hall concert – has the same motivation. The first and last movements memorialise two of Turnage’s friends; three movements in between are lighter but still loaded, centring on a peg-legged March. In the final Lament, a baroque-style repeated cello line gives the music a feeling of inevitability that feels something like peace.
The rest of the work, from its intense, unison beginning onwards, had felt loud and insistent, but that perhaps had as much to do with the performance as with Turnage’s writing. The upwardly whirling violin lines in the opening Threnody were delivered with a stress on each beat that kept them stubbornly earthbound; the accompanying voices in the scurrying second and loping fourth movements were always very present. There was no whispering to put the shouting into relief.
Those thick, opaque textures were a feature of much of the evening, making for passages in Beethoven’s Op 95 “Serioso” quartet and Tchaikovsky’s Quartet No 3 that sounded foursquare, despite Paul Watkins’s springy, directional cello lines and Lawrence Dutton’s long-spun viola solos. Yet when the quartet lightened up – at the end of the Tchaikovsky scherzo, and for the whole of the encore, the slow movement of Beethoven’s Op 135 – we heard flashes of this distinguished quartet at its best.
