Gildas Quartet
Tom Aldren violin, Gemma Sharples violin, Christine Anderson viola, Anna Menzies cello.
Brighton Dome Corn Exchange
Sunday 20 September, 2026
The first of just two coffee concerts produced by Strings Attached in the surprisingly warm acoustic of the Corn Exchange this season, this performance by the Gildas Quartet showcased their rich sound and elegant playing. And all four players read from digital music controlled with foot pedals – very modern.
The carefully curated programme, entitled “Journey of the English String Quartet”, gave us four twentieth/twenty-first century works by English composers connected by interpersonal links and presented in chronological order.
It began with Frank Bridge’s 1906 piece, Three Idylls for String Quartet. They captured the soulfulness of the music with especially attractive melodious, lyrical work from Anna Menzies on cello in the second movement.
That second movement was the one which Benjamin Britten, famously a pupil of Bridge, used for his 1937 work for string orchestra: Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge so it pointed neatly to Britten’s 1973 String Quartet no 3 which came after the interval.
Before that the quartet played William Alwyn’s String Quartet No 1 in D minor. (1953) I admired the playing of the mysterious minor harmonies in the first movement and the soaring work of Tom Aldren, playing first violin, and, in the last movement, evocative viola work from Chrstine Anderson.
And so to the five-movement Britten quartet, dating from the final months of the composer’s life. This performance was vibrant and arresting from the dramatic upward arpeggios passed round like a baton in the second movement to the sudden near-violence of the third movement with its exciting percussive col legno work from second violin, Gemma Sharples. They made the most, too, of the moments in the moonlight granted to both Violin 2 and Viola in the final movement which simply dies away at the end and is hard not to interpret as a reflection of the composer’s impending death. The loveliest, and most beautifully played movement in the piece, however, was the breathtaking second movement in which the pure, vibrato-free sound was as wistful and contemplative as I’ve ever heard it.
The final work was String Quarter no 6 by Colin Matthews was written for the Gildas Quartet who premiered it at the Aldeburgh Festival in 2025. As a young man Matthews worked with Britten so that provided another connection.
The work, which was new to me, is in eight movements each of which bears the title of a dance although it doesn’t seem very dance-like because much of it is firmly in “thoughtful” mood and mostly slow in tempo. The highlights were the energetic bows-down pizzicato in the Gigue and the snapped left hand pizzicato in the concluding Waltz-Mazurka 2. It was well enough played by four charismatically skilled musicians but I have to say I shan’t be too bothered if I don’t have to hear this work again. I hesitate to use the word “dreary” but …
