Down jackets and cashmere scarves have been mothballed, the streams and streams have been freed from the ice, even in the Oberland, and that means: chamber music is being played again in Icking. This year, the string quartet festival “Ickinger Frühling” is all about female music-making, after this project, like so many others, was on the back burner for two years. The Klenke Quartet will kick things off. A more experienced, versatile quartet could hardly have been found. With simple sovereignty, the four women from Weimar turn a program composed by at least two thirds of women into an event.
This is not a matter of course, because the G minor quartet by Emilie Mayer, a student of Carl Loewe, is not an easy piece. Lots of melodic particles come together in a short amount of time, most of which aren’t exactly catchy. Alone, Mayer’s Opus 14 is convincing here, because the Klenke Quartet forms with a steady hand, with foresight and care, creating a light texture of sound that only appears dry and too planned in a few places. The passage in the slow movement is of naïve piety when the cello intersperses casual pizzicati to the chorale melody “Wer nur den Lieben Gott walten”. It can’t be played more beautifully, more intimately.
For more than 30 years, Annegret Klenke and her fellow players have been perfecting a quartet culture of unobtrusive professionalism. It is not without reason that the great composer Ursula Mamlok, who emigrated from Germany to the USA as a Jew in 1936, became friends with the four musicians, whom she called their “children”. And with almost childlike joy, the quartet discovers shimmering structures and the longing for melody in Mamlok’s second string quartet, a free twelve-tone work. All this is presented in a subtle way, rhythmically concise, but never angular. Likewise Ravel’s F major quartet. Never languishing, only expressive and with a modern scent. The Klenke Quartet is interested in the nuances, which obviously excites the loudly Bravi audience.