In collaboration with Perth Festival of the Arts
St John’s Kirk, 23 May 2026
In their much applauded first concert for Perth Festival of the Arts there were two extra factors, quite apart from the excellence of the Resol String Quartet. First was the revivification of the once popular Coffee and Cake concert. The other was the co-production with the even older, founded 1948, Perth Chamber Music, who host an annual series of six professional concerts in the very building where this concert took place: St John’s Kirk.
The Resol Quartet began with the engaging, light, rapid Coleridge-Taylor’s Humoresque, before the main work of the first half: Bach’s Orchestral Suite No.3. This was most impressive in its arrangement for quartet. The Ouvertüre sounding immediately more ancient, was perhaps a little softened, but the lines were clarified. The famous Air (on the G-string) was given with honest lyricism. The remaining dance titled movements were bright and lively, ending with a celebratory, high spirited Gigue (Jig).
As a taster concert the second half was bang up-to-date with the modern, advanced, atmospheric sound of two Caroline Shaw pieces: Ellipse and The Beech Tree.
Then came the sonorous emotional playing of Barber’s famous Adagio rising to a heartfelt climax, break off, then devastatingly regretful, sudden pianissimo. Recovery and mood changing was the Allegretto semplice from Arnold Bax’s First Quartet: like a Dvořák-like serenade, opulently coloured, it danced its way through an almost orchestral variety of sounds.
Atmospherically, emotionally and startlingly Donald Grant’s The Witch of Leanachan ended their programme. Here “the witch with blue eyes turned men to stone.” Weird sounds started the piece: whiffling sounds and harmonics, before a Scottish lament with cello as bagpipe drone. Landscape evoking turned to a whirling dance, with vocal ejaculations (from a Quartet!) then a break off with all members of the Resol Quartet singing this intriguing work into the distance.
An amazing concert, very well received by a packed St John’s Kirk, showing brilliantly what a string quartet can achieve.
Ian Stuart Hunter