I Musicanti have become a firm favourite with the Peak Music audience, right from the joyful playing of their very first piece, Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, in Edensor Church in April 2019, to when they subsequently returned with Tamás András in September 2022 to the Cavendish Hall with a Beethoven programme.
As a group, they perform in two different combinations – an all-string quintet, and as a piano or ‘Trout’ (after Schubert’s much-loved piece) quintet, but always with the constant of its very talented double bass player and founder, Leon Bosch. So far, all three Peak Music performances have been in the former format.
On 14th October, they started with the delightfully melodic Quintet No. 3 by Boccherini. Ten years younger than Haydn, and thirteen years older than Mozart, you could be easily mistaken into thinking it had been written by either, and the Pastorale second movement even has echoes of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, written fifteen years later. The bass part of this quintet had been lost for some time, only recently being transcribed from a rather illegible score, so Leon could safely say that this was the first time it had been heard in Derbyshire! Most of Boccherini’s quintets were written for two cellos, but the three Op. 39 quintets were written for cello and bass. As his father was a double bassist, these could have been written to accommodate him.
The next piece was the Gran Quintetto Op. 99 by Bottesini, a great 19th century virtuoso bass player, prolific composer and conductor, known as the ‘Paganini of the double bass’, who conducted the first ‘Proms’ in London, before they acquired that sobriquet. Unsurprisingly, his works comprise a large part of the double bass oeuvre – Leon Bosch performed ten of them for his final examinations. Unfortunately, the performance had to be curtailed in the second movement when a member of the audience collapsed and required medical attention, so the quintet was resumed with the slow movement after an early interval.
Leon Bosch suffered terrible privations when imprisoned by the South African apartheid regime, so Mokale Koapeng’s Quintet for Strings, fifty years after the terrible aftermath of the Soweto uprising, has a particular resonance for him, born as he was just two years before Mokale, in 1961. I Musicanti played the beautiful slow movement of this piece – a haunting lament on a solo cello, with the other strings providing a pizzicato accompaniment.
The evening was rounded off with Dvorak’s String Quintet No. 2, ‘To my Nation’, written when he was 35 and entered into a competition, winning him 5 ducats! This piece had also provided the finale for I Musicanti’s first appearance for Peak Music in 2019, but its uplifting themes, melodies and pace never pall, the presence of a bass allowing the cello to move up in the range to a higher, more lyrical position, which Ursula Smith took full advantage of.
It’s invidious to single out any one artist from a group that meld so well together to keep an audience spellbound, but the Peak Music audience was delighted to finally welcome Gina McCormack as first violin, and they were not disappointed by her brilliant playing. We had been looking forward to her performing with the Brodsky Quartet for us in 2021, when sadly she had to give up public playing shortly beforehand, to look after her husband who had been diagnosed with motor neurone disease. It is only recently that she has started performing again, with I Musicanti. She and Leon Bosch had become good friends at the Witwatersrand University, where they studied at the same time, and they have remained good friends ever since, both moving to the UK at about the same time, Leon to Manchester and Gina to London.