Disappointing Maxwell Quartet Performance

The Maxwell tartan as published in the Vestiarium Scoticum (image provided by Celtus, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license)

Last night Music at Kohl Mansion wrapped up its virtual season with the first of two streams of the Maxwell Quartet. Based in Scotland, the group consists of violinists Colin Scobie and George Smith, alternating in occupying the leader’s chair, along with violist Elliott Perks, and cellist Duncan Strachan; and their performance was originally scheduled for streaming this past February 28 and March 4. Unfortunately, COVID-19 restrictions in the United Kingdom prevented them from gathering to rehearse and record. The program they prepared consisted of Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 106 quartet in G major and a selection of Scottish folk songs; and it will be streamed for a second time this Thursday, June 10, at 6 p.m. The quartet takes its name from the Scottish clan whose tartan (shown above) was sported by all four of the players.

The group performs with an energetic rhetoric, which was definitely consistent with the more exuberant Dvořák passages. Unfortunately, that exuberance tended to take its toll on intonation that noticeably missed the mark more often than one would have wished. Similarly, while there was an energetic approach to give-and-take as thematic material was shared by the four players, the resulting fabric was often too coarsely woven, particularly in the Dumka-based second (Adagio non troppo) movement. On the other hand the quartet’s account of four folk songs was surprisingly bland with little sense of shifts in rhetoric as they advanced from one tune to the next. One definitely would have expected a more raucous (or hungover) approach to Niel Gow’s “Drunk at Night, Dry in the morning!”

Clearly, the Maxwell Quartet had to contend with some major speed bumps in both preparing and recording this performance. For that matter, performing in the absence of a physical audience often has its own shortcomings; and the video crew was not much of an audience. (For that matter that crew did not seem particularly aware of how to capture the performance, particularly where the Dvořák was concerned, making for a few significant disconnects between what one saw and what one heard.) Hopefully, we shall not have to wait too much longer before ensembles like this one can again enjoy being in the presence of attentive listeners.