Meta4 String Quartet provide fantastic Kendal Midday Concert Club finale (From The Westmorland Gazette)

Meta4 String Quartet provide fantastic Kendal Midday Concert Club finale

1:10pm Sunday 1st April 2012 in Gig and concert reviews By Brian Paynes

Meta4 String Quartet, Kendal Town Hall GRACING the stage for the Kendal Midday Concert Club’s final recital of the season was the Meta4 String Quartet, a young Finnish ensemble rapidly establishing a world-wide reputation for itself and, incidentally, the final booking coup organised by Elizabeth Howe, the club’s erstwhile artists’ secretary. She must have been immensely proud because this was a magnificent finale to what has been a remarkably fine season.

Rarely can the town hall have witnessed such transcendental string sounds, such compelling musicianship, such intimacy and such total involvement in art of musical interpretation. The quartet were playing four 18th Century instruments on loan to them – a tremendous advantage, certainly – but what use they made of them! Quartets by Fauré (Op 121) and Schumann (Op 41 No 3) enabled them to superbly display their accomplishments. Always was there a mix of warm intense sound, refined control of dynamics, impeccable balance and tonal blend, immaculate phrasing, virtuosic crispness and rhythmic energy, an intelligent understanding and projection of their music’s emotional content and, not least, the creation of atmosphere – the audience was in a perpetual state of wonderment.

Brian Paynes