Heath Quartet with Ben Goldscheider
Brighton Dome Corn Exchange
25 January 2026
Co-produced by Strings Attached, which aims to promote Chamber Music in Brighton, this Sunday morning concert presented two mainstream delights and two which were almost certainly new to most of the audience.
We started with Mozart K 80, of which he wrote three sunny movements in Italy aged 14 and the final one three years later. The Heath Quartet stands to play (apart from cellist Christopher Murray who’s on a small dais). It allows them to work close together with a great deal of rhythmic body movement and eye contact and that, obviously, feeds into the sound quality. Highlights of this engaging performance were the quasi fugal entries, placed like conversation in the allegro and the grandiose mischief in the rondo right through to the Haydn-esque ending.
Then the quartet (different positions and in one case instrument) was joined by Ben Goldscheider for Mozart’s Horn Quintet K407. Although it’s fairly familiar this delightful work doesn’t get out anything like as much as the Clarinet Quinet, like which it requires two violas – and I have no idea why. The horn blends beautifully with the strings – Mozart and Jospeh Leutgeb for whom he wrote it – knew what they were doing. In this performance we got a palpable rapport between performers and very elegant dynamics. The horn legato work in the andante was stunning and the virtuosic fast runs in the rondo spectacular.
Eleanor Alberga’s 2012 Shining Gates of Morpheus completed the first half of the concert and took us to a completely different sound world with powerful rhythms against muted horn. It’s a rather soporific piece but since Morpheus was the god of sleep that was presumably the plan.
After the interval came York Bowen’s 1927 Horn Quintet which is a lot more Elgar then Schoenberg. It was a neat inclusion as it allowed for another piece with Goldschieder. The first movement is marked “serioso” and there was a lot of that along with fierce concentration as the five players passed round and developed the declamatory opening statement. I admired the impressive control in the andante and in the incisive playing in the fugato section of the rondo.
Of course these people are professional players. In a sense, they are “merely” doing their job. But part of what makes the Heath Quartet unusually and charismatically appealing in performance is that they seem genuinely to enjoy every note. And that makes their playing feel excitingly fresh.
This was my first visit to the Corn Exchange since renovation and when I first saw that vast performance area I was afraid that the acoustic might not work for a very small group at the front of it. Happily I need not have worried. It works well. However, I think the management should admit latecomers only at suitable breaks in the music, given the loudness of the banging doors and the creaking of the steps through the seating area.
