Kontra String Quartet

{TABLE} Quartet No 4 ......................... Nielsen Quartet in C. K465 (Dissonance) ....... Mozart Quartet in A flat, Op 105 ............. Dvorak {/TABLE THE KONTRA String Quartet was formed in Denmark in 1973 under the leadership of the Hungarian violinist Anton Kontra. The group has a formidable track record, well documented on disc, in the advocacy of contemporary music.

However, for their appearance at the AIB Music Festival in Great Irish Houses last Friday (as for their last Irish appearance, at the Belfast Festival of 1992), the nearest they got to our own time was the fourth and final quartet of Denmark's greatest composer, Carl Nielsen, composed in 1906 and revised in 1919. The Kontra's approach here, emphasised perhaps by the dry acoustic of the Freemasons Hall, had strong inclinations towards an astringency which seemed alien to this genial work.

The playing in the quartets by Mozart and Dvorak was, if anything, even more puzzling. Rigidity of pulse and a him trajectory of phrasing which seemed unable to take account of the music's natural rise and fall were features of the playing which, quite outweighed the group's undoubted colouristic and timbral skills.

The abiding, feeling was of an almost unyielding briskness and frequently, of an unusual indifference to the normal expressive inclinations engendered by the music. Against all the odds, the one movement which bucked the trend was the Andante cantabile of Mozart's Dissonance Quartet, where, at a quicker than usual pace, the music flowed naturally and with especial grace.