Another concert in our series of chamber music at Konserthuset, with the Maier quartet.

Premiere of Stabilitas loci by Ylva Skog. The composer herself was present to introduce the piece. Written during the pandemic isolation – quiet and a bit melancholy. Raindrops against a window that turn into little streams. Lovely – definitely the nicest part of this evening. And there’s more of her on Spotify!

String Quartet Op. 9 by Bo Linde. The information leaflet says that he “was active at a time when Swedish music life was characterized by disagreement between modernists and traditionalists, and counted himself as one of the latter”. I really can’t understand how because this piece sounded almost aggressively modern to me. Long stretches of pizzicato; notes so high that the violin could barely produce them and most of the audience very definitely couldn’t hear (and I only heard because I was sitting two metres from the violinist and have quite young ears still). I mean, you can use the violin as a balalaika but maybe then just write music for a quartet of balalaikas instead?

String Quartet No 15 A-minor Op. 132 by Beethoven. Quite dramatic, kind of all over the place. A more trained ear could probably hear how the different parts make a whole, but for me it was a jumble of disconnected parts. The slow movement (“Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der Lydischen Tonart”) felt like a constant slowing-down, like a Shepard tone but in speed and energy, not tone. I found it completely energy-sapping. Not my thing.

One thing that I have noticed and liked in many string quartets – but not all – is how no one instrument leads. They hand over the baton for the leading role to each other all the time. One instrument plays a phrase. Another responds, echoes, bounces it further – but it only follows this thread for a short while before it takes charge and introduces something new. Sometimes I get the impression that this is “a thing” for string quartets, and then some other one comes along (like the one by Linde) and I hear none of that in it, so then maybe it’s not. I have no musical education whatsoever, beyond what was mandatory in school, and they definitely didn’t go into this kind of detail about the characteristics of construction of different forms of classical music.