Celebrating 25 years of the Tippett Quartet

Lights, camera… music. The Tippett Quartet take their dedication to the Golden Age of Hollywood seriously, to the point of appearing in two recent blockbusters, Knives Out and Glass Onion, alongside Daniel Craig, Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson and Christopher Plummer – perfect preparation for recording the quartets of that towering composer of the silver screen, Eric Wolfgang Korngold.

Korngold’s complete quartets will be released on Naxos on Friday 10 March, followed by a concert at London’s Conway Hall on Sunday (12 March), an event that will celebrate 25 years since the Tippett Quartet was founded. Its members, John Mills and Jeremy Isaac, violins, Lydia Lowndes-Northcott, viola, and cellist Bozidar Vukotic, are all regulars with John Wilson’s Sinfonia of London and previously the John Wilson Orchestra, which Mills led for 20 years. They are also veterans of several film score recordings with Isobel Griffiths Ltd.

‘We felt our schooling in all aspects of music from Hollywood was the perfect fit for Korngold,’ says Isaac. ‘We’ve regularly programmed Korngold’s quartets over the past 10 years so we thought the time was right to record all three.’

Korngold was 23 when he started work on his First String Quartet in 1920. The piece, first performed in Vienna in 1924 and premiered in London the following year, has been described by Korngold scholar Brendan G Carroll as an ‘exceptional work’ and ‘extremely demanding to play’. Its late-Romantic language contains traces of Schoenberg’s expressionist harmonies and a strong flavour of the music of Richard Strauss. The Second String Quartet, drafted during the summer of 1933 at the composer’s country home in Upper Austria, is imbued with an old-fashioned gemütlich charm; it ends with a waltz that might easily have originated a century earlier in the ballrooms of Vienna.

Korngold travelled to Los Angeles in 1934 and became a permanent resident after the Nazi Anschluss in Austria four years later. He made his name in Hollywood (and won two Academy Awards) with a series of symphonic soundtrack scores, The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Sea Hawk among them. His third String Quartet, composed in 1944-45, offered an escape from the demands of tailoring his music to fit onscreen action. Korngold recycles melodies from his film scores in the quartet, with the tender love theme from The Sea Hawk quoted in the second movement and a melody from Devotion serving as the second subject of the work’s lively finale.

Crucially, the quartet decided to record in a studio, where they could most easily recreate the conditions under which the celebrated Hollywood Quartet recorded the works. ‘We made the album at School Farm Studios in north Essex, where we had many more microphones available and much greater control over the sound than would be the case if we were recording in a church. It had just the right level of acoustic warmth to make us feel comfortable, but allowed us to play in a way to achieve the best sound for Korngold. The speed and focus of the bow, for instance, and the focus of the left hand are very different from how you might play when you’re using the acoustics of a church as part of the sound.’

The Tippett Quartet's choice to record in a studio made the process behind their anniversary album much easier (©School Farm Studios)

Both violinists spoke of a difficulty familiar to all musicians: finding the right acoustic for performance and recording. ‘It can either be a lovely surprise or terrifying,’ said Isaac. ‘You always think you’ve found the driest acoustic in the world and then you find another. You can plan accordingly, and you go out on stage thinking it’s going to be a certain way but it can be the polar opposite. It can be a real shock.’

Mills talks of the ‘attritional effect’ taken on stamina when recording over the course of three nine-hour days. ‘We’ve done lots, mostly in cold churches. There are always external noises: creaks, pigeons, hedge cutters, road maintenance outside. When you are in a totally soundproof studio everything is useable, sustaining the intensity.’ During their session at School Farm Studios a helicopter took off and landed in the neighbouring field. They didn’t hear a thing.

And there’s another reason to go into the studio for these three quartets: Korngold’s ‘incredibly demanding’ tempi. Mills says: ‘Actually, they are kind of impossible. Most recordings are a long way off. A dry studio gives you a chance; a boomier acoustic and you would be lost. When we made our Mendelssohn disc in a church, we were greeted with apparently good news. “We have pulled up all the carpets!” Huge boom. In a dry room extreme tempi have a fighting chance.’

Mills and Isaac have been with the quartet 20 years, Lowndes-Northcott joined 11 years ago and Vukotic right from the start. When he was a teenager he had been conducted by Michael Tippett, a charismatic, encouraging and inspirational figure who had left an indelible impression with his powder blue suits and yellow shoes. One night in January 1998, Vukotic came home from a concert and switched on the TV. Newsnight had invited a string quartet in to play the slow movement of the composer’s second quartet to accompany the news of his death. Vukotic decided there and then to name his new quartet the Tippett Quartet.

‘Being the featured quartet in Knives Out and Glass Onion [playing two original soundtracks by Nathan Johnson] rubs off on your approach and understanding of the Korngold, exposing us to that studio environment,’ says Isaac. ‘Not many films feature a string quartet onscreen. Our experience of taking part in that Hollywood world, albeit of today, made us even more determined to record Korngold. We wanted to do his phenomenal quartets in a way that draws from our experience and is therefore completely true to who we are as a group.’