First Wednesday Recital, The Riverfront (From South Wales Argus)

First Wednesday Recital, The Riverfront

1:03pm Friday 5th February 2010

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You can always tell when a string quartet has been playing together to some constructive purpose and for a long enough time to achieve it.

The Hillman Quartet is composed of musicians associated with the young professional orchestra Sinfonia Cymru, which is providing hived-off small groups for the Riverfront’s monthly lunchtime recitals.

The orchestra itself performs regularly at the venue – and what a revelation the whole arrangement is turning out to be. Billed anonymously as ‘Musicians from Sinfonia Cymru’, the Hillman banished all ideas of a scratch group of players chosen at random and from the opening of Haydn’s Emperor Quartet sailed through its hour-long stint with the cohesion and concentration of veterans.

In this repertoire, ‘veteran’ status implies the successful plumbing of depth, which can take years of performing together until music becomes self-evidently the result of patient and prolonged investigation. So the Hillman has learned quite a lot in a short time.

In the Haydn, Schubert’s Quartettsatz and Shostakovich’s Dresden Quartet, exuberance was underpinned by sound internal relations, always exposed for scrutiny in a group so small and with such inspired division of labour.

Ease of delivery sometimes threatened to be end rather than means, but among many virtues were the confident assumption of responsibility as the theme changes hands in the Emperor’s second movement variations; the satisfying but ironical completeness of the ’unfinished’ Schubert movement; and the persuasive dying fall of the Shostakovich after those early, angry passages that oscillate so eerily between violence and dance. Practised playing, full of character and feeling

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