THE award-winning Villiers String Quartet made their debut appearance at Lake District Summer Music in an attractive programme at St Thomas’s Church, Kendal, writes CLIVE WALKLEY.

This concert was a collaborative venture with the young bass singer, Benjamin Appl who joined the quartet for a performance of Samuel Barber’s Dover Beach, a setting of words by Matthew Arnold.

The programme opened with a polished performance of the second of Haydn’s magnificent Op 76 string quartets and this established the quality of the playing for the rest of the evening. Close attention was paid to Haydn’s dynamic markings; all four players played as one, carefully pointing up the details of this finely constructed work.

The Villiers Quartet seek to devise innovative programmes, combining works from the standard repertoire with lesser-known pieces or commissioning new works. Thus, in this programme the inclusion of Delius’ second string quartet Late Swallows. Delius redrafted the work after its first performance and it is this version that is normally heard today. However, the original material has recently been reassembled and what we heard was the quartet as Delius originally conceived it in 1916. Listening to the work, so beautifully played, it is difficult to understand why the composer felt the need to rewrite it.

Dover Beach, a work written when the composer was only 21, seems to have fallen out of fashion with audiences today and so it was good to hear it so sensitively performed by the quartet and Benjamin Appl. The gloomy Victorian text, ostensibly a nocturnal meditation on the sea, but as the excellent programme notes described it, in reality ‘a metaphor for the flow of human existence,’ has a relevance to the contemporary world in which (to quote) ‘ignorant armies clash by night.’ Benjamin Appl’s rich baritone voice and authoritative delivery contrasted well with the four strings who immediately established the atmosphere of calm that pervades this piece.

The concert closed with Dvorak’s String Quartet No14, full of energy and melodic charm, which the quartet brought out in their performance.

Lake District Summer Music runs until Friday, August 11 when the highly acclaimed Berkeley Ensemble brings the 2017 festival to a terrific conclusion at Ambleside Parish Church (7.30pm).

Box office 01539-742621; online at www.ldsm.org.uk, or from the festival office at Kendal's Stricklandgate House, 92 Stricklandgate.