A fine Sydney day out for Melbourne’s liveliest string quartet.

Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House
May 25, 2015

Melbourne’s Tinalley String Quartet (Adam Chalabi, Lerida Delbridge, violins, Justin Williams, viola and Michelle Wood, cello) is 12 years old now and with a busy national and international schedule and a recent CD that has garnered some significant plaudits – not least in this magazine. This concert of Purcell, Haydn and Beethoven may not have been quite as new frontier-y as it said in the marketing blurb, but it was an excellent opportunity to catch an ensemble flying high right now on a relatively rare Sydney outing.

When Goethe made is oft-quoted remark about string quartets being “four rational people conversing” he was supposedly acknowledging the novelty of the Haydn of the Opus 20 quartets. But what Purcell’s Fantasias of 100 years earlier show is that nothing is ever as new as some people assume, for here, in music originally for four viols one finds all of those ingredients –four equal voices speaking both individually and as one. The Tinalley quartet approached a series of movements from these works as an opener with serious intent, perhaps a little light on the joyous...