Marmen Quartet

Lakeside, Nottingham

22 February 2024

5✩✩✩✩✩ Review: William Ruff.

“The Marmen Quartet: alive to every nuance of the music they perform.”

The best chamber ensembles are a joy to watch as well as hear. The Marmen Quartet clearly take delight in their art: their bodies seem inhabited by the music; their eyes shine as music passes from one player to the other. And they impress as four distinctive artists whilst creating something so much bigger than the sum of their individual roles. This is no mean conjuring trick to bring off – but the Marmens manage it effortlessly.

Of course, it always takes effort to appear effortless. It was apt that they started their Lakeside programme with one of Mozart’s Quartets (K.428), dedicated to Haydn, the composer who practically invented the string quartet. Mozart was someone who usually wrote very fast but with these Quartets he was out to impress and described them ‘as the fruits of a long and laborious toil’. The result: works which burst with confidence and astound with their ingenuity and intricacy. They are also some of the first string quartets in which all four instruments are of equal importance and reveal four distinct personalities. The Marmens’ approach to tempo, phrasing and dynamics was exemplary, exhilarating in the outer movements whilst relishing the beauty of the slow movement at its spiritual heart.

Then came something much less familiar: A Way A Lone by the Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu. Luckily Johannes Marmen gave an enlightening introduction to the piece, explaining its background and its highly evocative sound world. It was the composer’s only work for string quartet, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that he threw into it just about every technique you could expect a string player to master: lots of tremolos, swooping up and down the strings, playing on the bridges of their instruments – and much more. And it was very helpful to know that the idea of ‘waves’ is central: large, small, shimmering, overlapping, violently crashing or gently lapping. There were wave shapes everywhere and they made for a compelling experience, as intense for the eyes as the ears.

After the interval came Debussy’s String Quartet, another piece which invites four separate individuals to shine whilst presenting a unified approach. It’s not a piece that gives up its secrets easily and its performers have to illuminate music which (in the opening movement especially) seems to crosscut between a rich variety of ideas. The Marmens revelled in Debussy’s sonic demands: sensitive blending of lines, acute sense of balance and an uncanny (almost telepathic) approach to dynamics. The scherzo’s striking use of pizzicato and the slow movement’s impassioned climax were just two highlights of a memorable performance.

We were taken back to the beginning for the encore: the minuet from the Haydn quartet which had so inspired Mozart, a fitting conclusion to an evening of inspiring music-making.

Marmen Quartet: Johannes Marmen (violin), Laia Valentin Braun (violin), Bryony Gibson-Cornish, (viola), Sinéad O’Halloran (cello)