Tim Ashley
Wednesday January 7, 2004
The Guardian

If this concert is anything to go by, the Aviv String Quartet, founded in 1997, is rapidly emerging as one of today's finest chamber ensembles. Rich, warm and distinctive in sound, their playing combining technical exactitude with instinctive emotional intensity. Their methodology is often striking. With many quartets, the first violinist tends to be the principal figure. Here, however, the second violinist Evgenia Epshtein and viola player Shuli Waterman are predominant, anchoring their performances in rhythmic and harmonic density and gradually prising the music open from within, while the leader, Sergey Ostrovsky and cellist Rachel Mercer weave gracious tendrils of sound around them.

Their programme was high-voltage stuff, opening with two unusually tricky works that peer beyond chamber music to larger forms. Beethoven's 11th Quartet in F Minor is overtly dramatic, even operatic, and the Aviv's performance balanced singing lyricism from leader and cellist with fiery drama and musical athleticism. Schumann's Third Quartet in A Major, meanwhile, aspires to both the grandeur and experimentalism of his symphonies. Here, we were made acutely conscious of Schumann's structural audacity and harmonic daring - the second movement is a set of variations, which places the theme at the centre rather than the start, while the chromatic suspensions and throbs of the Adagio prefigure Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.

Shostakovich's Ninth Quartet came after the interval. Again the structure is daunting: the Quartet plays as a single, whole, its first four sections providing the thematic material for a massive finale that draws its disparate threads together. It can easily fail in performance if the cumulative momentum is lost at any point, though in this instance it formed an unbroken arch of sound that veered from pained nostalgia via explosive violence and morbid humour to hard-won triumph. An impressive evening that marked the Aviv String Quartet out as a force to be reckoned with.