String Quartet No 7 (Summer Eves) (2012)

The quartet’s subtitle, taken from Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale, is ‘Summer eves’, and the languorous good humour associated with that time of year was caught in the relaxed and genial radiance of the opening sonata-form Allegro sanguino. A delicate and nervously darting scherzo was followed by an unbuttoned second scherzo in the form of a perpetuum mobile, which tore through its compact material with abandon. At the heart of the piece was a weighty and impassioned extended Adagio in which a single unison phrase transmuted into hushed chords, juxtaposed with cadenzas for cello, for viola and for the two violins together. This substantial utterance plunged the listener into darker, more unsettling regions. Here, perhaps, was a touch of what Elgar once described, in the context of the first movement of his Second Symphony, as ‘a sort of malign influence wandering through the summer night in the garden’. In the rondo finale, something of the opening movement’s more relaxed tone was resumed. After a strongly rhythmical passage, the material gathered momentum, culminating in a tiny closing Presto that evaporated into a final glimpse of a calm summer sky at dusk.

This demanding score packed in a wealth of incident into 25 minutes and, in an admirably committed account, the Carduccis were able to suggest convincingly an overall cohesion to its various strongly contrasted elements. It is a mark of McCabe’s continuing ability to surprise and intrigue that in this, his most outwardly genial and ‘classical’ quartet, he should have buried a number of subversive elements. As a consequence, the piece was, in effect, more ambiguous and complex than the radiant, picturesque mood-painting its subtitle implies.