07-05-2025
Quatuor Danel review — I was agog with wonder at the finesse and delicacy
★★★★★
Three Soviet string quartets of the 1970s: it may suggest the kind of challenging concert where the only blast of jollity comes from enjoying an ice cream during the interval. Yet leaving Wigmore Hall, I felt exhilarated, practically walking on air.
The music itself (the composers were Mieczyslaw Weinberg and Shostakovich) certainly played some part in this. But the evening's dominating pleasure was the brilliance of Quatuor Danel, four mostly French musicians of varying ages and heights, long resident at Manchester University, who displayed such heightened finesse, such thorough commitment, such exquisite delicacy, such roaring fury — anything their music required — that I sat agog with wonder.
Take the cellist Yovan Markovitch. Fastidious but heartfelt, his head rarely still, he buttoned our ears
