On Wednesday night I came out of the Wigmore Hall buzzing. Sometimes, after a concert that really grabs you, it can take a while to work out what made it stand out. But the Zehetmair Quartet have something that makes them immediately and obviously different from any other chamber ensembles I can think of offhand - everything they perform is played from memory.
You could dismiss this as a pretentious gimmick were it not for the fact that violinist Thomas Zehetmair and his three colleagues so regularly hit the bullseye. Of course playing from memory improves their performance, the obvious argument goes: if they know the music by heart, they must know it better than anyone who still has to read it off the page; and besides, surely the lack of music stands between the players means their communication with each other must be unfettered.
Well, maybe - but I think it goes deeper than that, and it involves us as listeners (and viewers) too. The work in which this most struck me was Bartok's Quartet No 5 - not a piece most would describe as easy listening. Or, indeed, as easy memorising. And there's the thing - in order to commit the notes to memory, the players have presumably had to break this superficially unruly music right down into a series of shapes, logical phrases and thought-through gestures. And perhaps because they have already unravelled the music's syntax in their heads, its structure comes over all the clearer to the listener.
Or maybe there's something else at work too. On a visual level, can the experience of watching four musicians play "difficult" music actually be alienating? After all, they are only following the notes and directions of a composer who is probably absent, and quite possibly dead. If the music goes in unfamiliar directions - well, perhaps it makes sense to that absent/dead composer, but it doesn't have to make sense to anybody present in the hall, musicians included. However, if those musicians have the music held in their heads - if we are not watching them reading somebody else's instructions - then does that somehow inspire more confidence in the completeness of what they are playing? It's not that we might believe they are improvising - rather that, if they don't need the map, they clearly know the territory, and will be able to guide us through it.
I'm not for a moment suggesting that conventional quartets don't work hard at making sense of the music they play for their audiences. And they probably feel that learning the music by heart would be a staggeringly inefficient use of time, especially if they get through more music each year than the Zehetmairs.
But what do you think? Should more ensembles experiment with chucking away the music stands? And conversely, do you (as I do sometimes) feel short-changed when musicians who are traditionally meant to have learned their parts - lieder singers and concerto soloists - use their books as a crutch in performance? Is there something in this, or is it all just an optical illusion?
