Park Lane Group Young Artists Recital, Purcell Room - 14th January 2010

The early-evening slot featured the excellent Finzi Quartet in two very different pieces. My Day in Hell (2007) found Cheryl Frances Hoad grappling with the implications of Dante's “Divine Comedy” in a diverse yet tautly argued movement structured around the proportions of Hell as its most famous commentator envisioned it. For all that, an element of 'comedy' – at least in the human sense – ensured that the musical response never became overbearing. A striking piece from someone with something to say and the only proviso would be that Hoad might one day find it wanting – not least in the context of Arthur Bliss's Second Quartet (1950) which, if not in itself revelatory, has a depth and seriousness of purpose that bespeaks a composer at his height of his creative powers. Its four movements are nominally conventional in form, but their angle of approach is as distinctive as it is personal, which also holds for a tonal and expressive trajectory hardly to be taken for granted. Heartening to find a piece of such understated maturity being taken up by musicians at the outset of their professional careers, and for whom its considerable technical challenges were confidently surmounted. Clearly the Finzi Quartet is an ensemble from whom we will doubtless be hearing more.
- Richard Whitehouse