Fibonacci Quartet
Strings Attached
Brighton Corn Exchange
19 April 2026
This interesting concert gave us two string quartets written 86 years apart but each focusing on the composer’s love for a specific woman.
But first came arrangement by the Fibonacci Quarter of a short suite of Moravian folk songs – the sort of thing which inspired Janacek whose String Quartet no 2 followed. I have never before attended a string quartet concert which opened with the First Violin (Luna De Mol) singing but he did it well and the rest of the songs ranged from soulful to dancelike with plenty of anguish.
This Fibonacci plays with a great deal of commitment and passion and I admired the pain of the ponticello playing – a strangely harsh sound – in the opening movement of the quartet which seeks to present in music the tenor of the 700 letters Janacek obsessively wrote to Kamila Stosslova. There were eloquently played harmonies in the third movement and I enjoyed the folksy rhythmic chords with some powerful cello underpinning (Findlay Spence) in the last movement.
Watching the Fibonacci Quartet is an unusual visual experience. De Mol sits on a elevated piano stool and holds himself very upright. Krystof Kohout (Violin 2) and Elliot Kempton (viola) are crouchers and there is surprisingly little obvious eye contact. Yet the music coheres sensitively enough so they are evidently communicating in other ways.
After the interval came Schumann’s String Quartet in A minor. Written in 1842 just two years after his marriage to the adored Clara and the famous fury of her father, it’s a melodious, happy piece. Highlights of this performance included a sensitively played adagio and nicely pointed up contrasts in the second movement especially in the playful Tempo risoluto passage. Kempton’s viola work in the third movement delighted and all four players really ran with quasi Mozartian wit in the last movement.
I am not keen on talking from the platform in concerts at the best of times. And there is absolutely no need for a player to repeat the information already printed in the free programme sheet which almost every audience member is holding. This practice of verbal introductions could, and should, be dropped next season.
