Mee Na Lojewski sat down with CutCommon to share her account of five weeks on the road with Affinity Quartet, during an intensive tour of Italy, Austria, Germany, Belgium, and the United Kingdom, including a prestigious invitation to the Amsterdam String Quartet Biennale as the only Australian quartet.
1. Brett Dean and Affinity Quartet, Amsterdam String Quartet Biennale (photo by Leo Samama).
Wanting to tour as a string quartet is a bit like wanting to tour as a band — circumstances aren’t always that glamorous on the road, or that well paid. But it’s about wanting to take yourself outside your comfortzone, to ask questions about your artform, to reach new audiences, and to deepen a shared chemistry, dedication, and craft in a tightknit group.
Unlike a symphony orchestra or an opera company, no string quartet in the world can stay in one city and make a livelihood — touring is essential for its growth and survival. It’s also essential for a young quartet to experience working day in and day out together, adapting their sound to different venues’ acoustics, developing stamina, and balancing the various challenges and rewards that come with working on the concert circuit.
Australia has a way to go to develop enough support for national touring and livelihood for Australian string quartets, but I know there are enough committed groups here impatient for this.
2. Affinity Quartet atop Monte San Giorgio, Italy
3. Affinity Quartet opening concert of tour, Piossasco, Italy
Affinity Quartet has undertaken two 5-week overseas tours in under 4 years. In a string quartet, you do really need to know your colleagues, to trust them on stage to deliver a shared musical vision in every performance. It’s written into the way composers write for the medium, each part interlocking with a powerful precision of rhetoric and harmony like a fantastic instrument of 16 strings. When it works, it’s incredible — and it feels and sounds like the most natural way of playing music in the world.
The life of a professional string quartet is quite private and solitary. They’re on the road with each other all the time, often self-managing and liaising with agents in different countries. They rarely talk about their work process or the stories they share together; you only hear their final product delivered on stage. Working closely with our mentors at the Amsterdam String Quartet Biennale during our Young Talents Residency, and then with Rainer Schmidt of Hagen Quartet, and Heime Müller formerly of Artemis Quartet, it was amazing to glean insights into their own worlds-behind-closed-doors: their approaches to different aspects of quartet life, how they arrived at musical decisions, and secrets to their quartet’s longevity.
4. Affinity Quartet with Heime Müller, Lübeck Musik Hochschule
One of our teachers said he was the only member of his quartet to play from an iPad because he loves playing from the whole score. “Ah, so you’re the ‘brains’ of your quartet then!” we teased, which made him laugh with a twinkle in his eye.
Another teacher described how members of her quartet were not kind to each other in rehearsals. One couldn’t possibly tell that, though, by how they performed together.
Another spoke about how he and another member in his quartet weren’t really able to have a conversation in person, but when they played music together, it was on a level he would never forget.
5. Affinity Quartet opening the Archipelago Chamber Music Season, Fondazione Cini Venice
Ultimately, it’s the quality of music-making, the unspoken part, that binds a group together. The group develops its own unique, close relationship. There’s not a winning formula, but perhaps it’s a willingness to balance the individual with the collective, to enjoy refining a musical voice made up of four equals, each with different strengths. I know that in some passages when I play with our violist William, we should sound like a single instrument with resonating overtones. Pairings like this happen across the quartet in different combinations all the time, and if these wirings could be lit, you would be able to picture the most wonderful glowing spiderweb.
For each of us in Affinity Quartet, what first brought us to the string quartet medium were the composers: Haydn, Beethoven, Shostakovich, Bartók, Brahms. Their string quartets are visceral and intimate, witty and profoundly imaginative, and they achieve all of this using just four ‘sibling’ instruments.
It’s hard to summarise a tour, but a few things we’ll not forget are:
- Landing in the magical town of Piossasco and giving our first concert of the tour, including me speaking in Italian to our audience — much to the amusement of my colleagues!
- Opening the 2020 Archipelago Chamber Music Season in Venice with the magnificent Venetian Lagoon as a backdrop.
- Sharing the spotlight with Brett Dean, working on his latest string quartet Hidden Agendas, for a packed audience at the Amsterdam String Quartet Biennale.
- Playing Beethoven’s Razumovsky Quartet No. 1 for City Music Society at St Bartholomew the Great in London.
- Performing on two days’ notice a rigorous concert program for Les Voix Intimes Festival in Belgium.
- Coming out of many an intense lesson feeling transformed and inspired.
- Sharing a meal together in Tournai’s best pizza restaurant after travelling across two countries that day.
- Rehearsing early in the morning and late into the night in a variety of living rooms and hotel rooms.
- Performing with Aussie mezzo soprano, Lotte Betts-Dean and together giving the world première of Matt Laing’s Portrait of Blood for an audience of more than 300 at St Martin-in-the-Fields on our last day of tour.
6. St Martin-in-the-Fields Embassy Series: Affinity Quartet with Lotte Betts-Dean, premiering Matt Laing’s Portrait of Blood
Things like this become Affinity Quartet’s shared history. Like all wonderful moments, they’re over all too soon, so we’re glad to be asked to take a moment to talk about it. Thank you to our amazing individual donors for their support and belief, to the Australia Council for the Arts for co-funding our tour, to Kennedy Nolan Architects, the Australian Elizabethan Trust, and Creative Partnerships Australia.
7. Affinity Quartet overlooking Venice, Italy
Images supplied.
