The concert at the United Reformed Church on Saturday evening (8th May). In the Sinfonietta’s Festival of British Musicseries, was a remarkable event. It’s not every day that a distinguished string quartet performs in St. Helens, and it was pleasant to see how many people were attracted to the event. The Castlefield Quartet from Manchester (Rachael Drury, India Patel, Anna Smith and Doug Badger) took on two rarely heard and formidably demanding major works, whose essence they fully grasped and projected with conviction and polished unanimity. There is something special about a string quartet in an intimate setting such as this: it’s rewarding for the audience to be able to watch as well as hear the interplay, realising to some extent how the complex magic is done.

The String Quartet by Elgar is an unjustly neglected masterpiece of his autumnal years, sombre in tone but richly beautiful and at times powerfully driven. But the outstanding event of the evening was Benjamin Britten’s Third Quartet, his last work, composed in the shadow of a final and debilitating illness. It’s not easy listening, but it compellingly blends the awareness of death with an fierce unconquerable creative urge and an undiminished mastery of technical detail. One is made all too aware of the mortality of great minds often at the height of their powers.

A darkly beautiful Chacony (variations on a ground bass) by Purcell – edited by Britten, who admired Purcell above all composers – had begun the concert, telling us at once of the high quality of these players and the profundity of what we were to hear.
Ted Kirk