Chapter One: People
The Roman composer Gregorio Allegri (1582-1652) is perhaps best-known for his setting of Psalm 51, the Miserere. Written for the Papal Choir in the Sistine Chapel, the motet requires its upper voices regularly to soar to spine-tingling heights. Copies were a jealously guarded Vatican secret, but the youthful Mozart is said to have written it out from memory after a single hearing. Amongst Allegri’s other compositions, however, is a work of potentially much greater import: a little Sonata a quattro for solo strings – 2 violins, viola and cello. Rightly or wrongly, the absence of any prescribed keyboard bass has led to claims that this is the first-ever piece for string quartet in the form familiar today.
So when, in 1953, four front-rank string-players decided to take the risk of abandoning orchestral life for the greater freedom but greater insecurity of playing quartets for a living, their choice of the name Allegri was a happy inspiration. Aside from the neat historical connection, the name had the further advantage of starting with an A, which was helpful not just as an indication that the Allegri were setting out their stall alongside other eminent colleagues – the Amadeus, say, or the Aeolian or the Amici – but also because it guaranteed a place near the top of agents’ lists.
The four musicians were some of the brightest talents to have emerged on to the London musical scene in the difficult days since the ending of the War. The prime movers were the violinist Eli Goren and the cellist William Pleeth, who recruited Patrick Ireland as viola player and James Barton as second violin. All four had had previous quartet experience, with varying degrees of commitment.
Eli Goren’s background was Austrian, but his family had been forced to flee after the Anschluss in 1938, first to Israel and then to England. Now he was leader of the Kalmar Chamber, but also anxious to play quartets, possibly for a living. Accounts of his playing emphasize his beautiful sound: to his colleagues, Goren, sensitive and intelligent, possessed as one of them puts it of “a kind of Beethovenian gravitas”, was first and foremost a musician’s musician. It was Goren who recruited James Barton, who at 23 was still under the eagle eye of that great violinist and teacher Max Rostal. A summons to play duets one evening – Spohr and Viotti – was in effect an audition. In turn, Patrick Ireland, then on the point of leaving the Gibbs Quartet, was identified as a possible recruit for the viola position, though it took six months and considerable persuasion by all parties before the Allegri could meet for its first rehearsals. The cellist, William Pleeth, handsome and patrician, was somewhat older – he had in fact been James Barton’s teacher for chamber music at the Guildhall, but the relationship, initially distant, soon settled into one of equality. Pleeth already had a well-established piano trio with the violinist Erich Gruenberg and the pianist Edmund Rubbra, but he and Goren were united in a desire to found a group to explore the wider repertoire for four strings.
Patrick Ireland had already played in the Quartet led by Peter Gibbs for five years, and was on the point of abandoning music as his livelihood: he had already applied for a job as a museum curator. James Barton brought a certain individuality to the appearance of the group as he was an example of that rare phenomenon, the left-handed violinist. The left-handed violinist is an extremely rare sighting – especially in symphony orchestras where in the old days at least, he (or she) was considered uncomfortably conspicuous. Because the instrument itself requires radical modification – new bass bar and peg box, and the sound post shifted – tonal problems can also arise. And how do you sit? Old photographs show early Allegri experiments. The eventual pattern adopted had Patrick Ireland seated on Eli Goren’s left and James Barton seated on William Pleeth’s right. With the instrument thus facing slightly more forward than normal, keener ears would notice a marginally improved projection of the second violin line as a result.
And so the die was cast. There were 68 rehearsals before their first public appearance. How many people, reading this, still know what guineas are? The Allegri’s first concert fee was 30 guineas, for a concert at Cranleigh School, which translates into £31-50 in pre-Euro English currency. Patrick Ireland recalls that after the performance, questions were invited from the boys. One bright spark piped up and asked if the name “Allegri” meant that they were “Allagreed!”
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How long is the life of a String Quartet? The question is regularly floated, but almost impossible to answer. Longevity is a much-prized virtue, and for a quartet brings with it great assets in terms of musical understanding between sympathetic partners, comfortable personal relationships, familiarity of repertoire leaving time to rehearse the finer details, a general sense of security. There is no substitute for living, day after day, inside Haydn’s Lark or Emperor quartets, or Beethoven’s three Razumovsky pieces, or Schubert’s Death & the Maiden, or even Janáček’s Intimate Letters. The downside needs vigilance: routine performances, staleness in the individual musicians, tolerance of personal quirks turning through time to intolerance. Stories of quartet members not on speaking terms with each other will sometimes surface in musicians’ gossip, even amongst world-renowned ensembles. But it needs to be said that longevity is a rarity not a commonplace; and that groups which go through their entire existence without a single change of personnel like the Amadeus are the exception rather than the rule. And when Peter Schidlof died, there was no question of the Amadeus continuing. The majority of string quartets, then, either wither in the early years, or settle into a process of slow but continuous Darwinian evolution.
The Allegri were to opt for this second route, which was never going to be unproblematic but which has kept the Allegri name happily alive, and at the musical forefront, for Fifty Glorious Years: the whole, somehow, managing to remain greater than the sum of the constituent parts. Since the beginning, in 1954, there have been 13 changes of personnel all told. The Allegri have had 3 first violins, 5 second violins, 6 viola players, and 3 cellists. Real human life is such that the upheavals happen for all kinds of different reasons.
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The original Allegri lasted nine years. The first to break ranks, in 1963, was the youngest member, James Barton. As with every single subsequent move of the Allegri’s personnel, his decision to move on could not be put down to any one single motive. No one gives up playing quartets lightly. In this early case, as with most others, frustration with the endless travel, the desire for a more regular monthly income, and a feeling that their repertoire was a touch unadventurous were some of the contributory factors. When Eli Goren left a few years later, he commented that in the six months before his departure, the Allegri had given 75 concerts in 75 different places. James Barton went to a post at the University College of South Wales and settled outside Cardiff, where he still is, 40 years on.
Enter, then, a new second violin: Peter Thomas, actually a pupil of Eli Goren. Youthful, fresh-faced, deeply musical, he fitted in like a glove. What is it about second violins? Obviously they do not take the full glare of the spotlight all that often. But do they have to be chameleons, or the ones who always end up folding the music-stands or buying the travel tickets? Peter Carter says second violins sometimes develop a charming streak of perversity, as a counterbalance. He should know: he was second violin in the Dartington Quartet for 10 years before leading the Allegri! But with the two already mentioned, and with David Roth for 31 years and then Fiona McNaught and now with the group’s latest recruit Rafael Todes, (once an economist at Cambridge – now there’s perversity for you), the Allegri have been singularly blessed in the occupants of this chair.
Four years after Barton’s departure, in 1967, Bill Pleeth at the cello desk finally and reluctantly accepted that, for him, teaching the cello held sway over playing and especially touring. His decision was unchallengeable: decades later, the name of William Pleeth is still synonymous with one of the greatest cello pedagogues there has ever been, with Jacqueline du Pré only the most prominent among his countless eminent pupils. It was not unknown for Jackie, still a girl, to arrive early for a lesson and sit in on the end of an Allegri rehearsal.
The arrival of Bruno Schrecker in succession to Pleeth proved to be another Red Letter Day for the Allegri. Bruno knew his way round the quartet world, as a member of the aforementioned Gibbs Quartet. Music was in his bloodstream: his father and that fine Austrian composer Franz Schreker had been first cousins. His glorious tone and phrasing never strayed beyond the bounds of propriety. Colleagues past and present speak with awe of his sense of anticipation, his ability to ‘include them in,’ musically. Voluble, passionate, energetic, he had and has a wonderful sense of humour. E.g., after a concert where the quartet outnumbered the backstage admirers: “You can let in the first 20!” And yet behind the jokes, there was a deep sense of responsibility, of the music (and the job) being greater than the individual players. Witness another Schrecker comment, remembered by another colleague: “If I’d spent as many hours practising as I have driving, I’d have been a much better cellist!” For audiences at least, Bruno Schrecker simply was the Allegri.
What change means in a string quartet is the need to bring new members up to speed with repertoire which the others may feel they know almost by heart. To some extent, the tricks of the trade can be easily learnt: the odd nasty corner here, tricky ensemble there, watch the intonation at letter C, ignore the marked rit. at letter D, and so on. But a lot more, and the vital sense of security, can only be learned by doing it: preferably in rehearsal rather than performance, though the latter has been known. Since time is such a precious commodity in any musician’s life, the temptation is always there for the older hands just to say “we do it this way”, and for the newer hands to follow suit unquestioningly, out of a commendable desire not to rock the boat, or the ensemble. Vital personal interactions can hinge on such attitudes. Not for nothing does Patrick Ireland, looking back on his 20-plus years in the Allegri, say that by the time he was on leader number three, he felt “knocked about a bit, certainly, but grateful for having learned huge lessons about relationships.”
In 1969, though, he still had plenty of work in front of him. What we might call the second main Allegri formation of Messrs Maguire, Roth, Ireland and Schrecker remained a fixture in the firmament for the best part of a decade, until first Hugh Maguire was tempted away to begin his long association with Aldeburgh, and then the unthinkable: Patrick Ireland’s retirement. (He came back regularly but we’ll come to that in due course!) Once again the surviving members admit to having found the changes a blow and the process of recruitment nerve-wracking, almost as bad as the choice of a spouse or partner. In due course, though, a chrysalis of Peter Carter, David Roth, Prunella Pacey and Bruno Schrecker turned into a beautiful butterfly, and the first of several mutants of the third-period Allegri took wing.
It only lasted five years – but Prunella Pacey’s departure from the viola position, which had been on the cards for some time before it finally happened in 1981, triggered by family commitments, was less disruptive than it might have been. A replacement was found without too much difficulty, because the Dartington Quartet (in which Peter Carter had previously played second fiddle) disbanded the previous year, and their viola player Keith Lovell was available, and thus invited to come up to the smoke. The second third-period Allegri was soon back on the road. They were never invited to 10 Downing Street, as an earlier formation of the Quartet once was, back in the Harold Wilson days, to play at the 21st birthday of one of his sons – but when Thatcherite market forces were elsewhere proving difficult, they more than survived. Some of the Allegri’s various survival mechanisms over 50 years will emerge in the following pages.
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This is not the place to document every single life story of all seventeen Allegri members, their reasons for joining or departing, and their subsequent often very distinguished career paths. Some other time, perhaps. But we can perhaps be allowed one exception, because it tickles up one problem we all face: anno domini! When Keith Lovell in his turn retired in 1988, feeling that he wanted to get back to the quiet life in Devon and his boat on the River Dart, and thus prompting the first change of personnel for seven years, some hard thinking had to be done. Peter Carter was 53, David Roth 52, and Bruno Schrecker 60. Even if, for them, the first faint inklings of an impending bus pass were not yet quite on the horizon, constant travel was less attractive than it had been, and bodies and fingers more prone to complain. A youth policy for youth’s sake made no sense, but some thought had to given to the morrow nonetheless – or perhaps the day after the morrow. Finding the right viola player to succeed Keith Lovell was no easy task – but the eventual choice of Roger Tapping felt right from many points of view. He would be young enough to be the son of his three colleagues but had plenty of experience under his bow, with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and the Raphael Ensemble amongst others, an apparent willingness to adapt combined with a determination to explore, and a considerable ambition to succeed in a profession he already knew even from limited experience to be challenging. The other members knew that a youth policy meant a lot of familiar repertoire would have to be re-studied for Roger’s benefit. But he found them more than willing. God, the art historian Aby Warburg often said, is in the details: a principled refusal to take anything for granted, a willingness to scratch heads over a missing staccato dot in K. 387, say, or over a dubious metronome mark in Bartok 3, made for more time spent on rehearsals that were often demanding in themselves. But everybody benefited, and most of all the composers. Roger Tapping brought the same approach to new works by James Macmillan or Duncan Druce as he did to Dvorak or Debussy. For anyone joining a professional quartet, stamina is a key requirement: that first year, Roger Tapping played 60 quartets new to him!
So his move to the Takács Quartet six years later – last in, first out – was unexpected and de-stabilizing. The others felt that perhaps the break-up of his marriage to a fellow-musician who had even sometimes played with the Allegri made him want a clean break. Even if the careers of Messrs. Roth and Schrecker had now only a few years to go, they nevertheless felt immensely grateful for the breath of fresh air that Roger Tapping had been, and for the demanding quality of his musicianship. His departure, and replacement by the amiable bulk of the similarly youthful Jonathan Barritt, though no-one was to know it at the time, initiated an unsettled period as Father Time continued to creep up inexorably on the others.
By the time of the 50th anniversary, though, things looked to have stabilized once again. At least there were more women on board. Music has often tended to be a male-dominated world, though Britain has possibly a better record than most other countries in opening up the profession to women. The process of undermining the traditional place of women in hearth and home was accelerated by the two world wars, but only after 1945 does the musical balance seriously seem to adjust. It took a long time for the Allegri to acquire their first female member, and the same amount of time thereafter for the second to be invited to join. But as we noted above, 1977 saw the arrival of the first of the three to date, Prunella Pacey taking over the viola desk on Patrick Ireland’s retirement. Then in the Millennium year, Fiona McNaught who was David Roth’s immediate successor as second violin on his retirement was perhaps never going to stay long, as her career as a soloist was burgeoning even when she joined – but her departure after only two years was still a blow. The most recent female recruit, to the viola position in 2001, is an interesting choice, as Dorothea Vogel is Swiss, and brings to the group not only exemplary musicianship but obvious vivacity and something of her country’s legendary gift for precision. ‘Dot’ as she is called soon settled in with ease, as indeed have all her predecessors.
Changing faces is a phenomenon for which in other contexts the human resources people sometimes use the unlovely word ‘churn.’ None of the Allegri’s churn means that continuity has been absent even from recent Allegri history. David Roth as second violin and Bruno Schrecker as cellist were both members for 31 years. Patrick Ireland served 24 years on the viola, though he says he still remembers “a sense of failure” when the very first Allegri was unable to retain its original formation. When he eventually hangs up his bow, Peter Carter will have clocked up nearly 30 years. Continuity and change have gone hand in hand. Over and above the changes, though, has hovered something more than a name. Indeed, the Allegri could hardly have survived on a name alone. Trying to pin down what gives a quartet a sense of individuality is to deal in intangibles. Some of the more tangible characteristics – repertoire, links with places or people, educational work – will be dealt with later on. Suffice it for now to define the particular Allegri style as, indeed, a blend of maturity and spontaneity, a solid anchoring in the great mainstream tradition of Central Europe rather than New World: an approach where the search for musical truth matters more than stunning virtuosity or even the ultimate sweetness of tone. Musical intelligence and understanding matter more than homogenous blend, and so Patrick Ireland’s warm viola tones or Bruno Schrecker’s burnished gleam on the cello were marks of character that were to be understood as defining the Allegri’s individuality, and were part and parcel of the teamwork, not a threat to it. Always the search for musical meaning, and for ever better technical service to some of the Everests of musical literature, implied a constant striving for elusive goals. For the Allegri, even in the most familiar pieces, the Bird or the Hunt, the Harp or the American, the journey has always been as important as the destination.
Perhaps that suggestion of perfection perpetually just out of reach is not the right note on which to end a survey of 17 wonderfully gifted individuals. They are, after all, people too. It is in the nature of things that old prospectuses or programme-books largely concentrate on the music. Audiences for string quartets are largely serious-minded folk, a little tweedy, perhaps, against their smart operatic counterparts or open-shirted orchestral equivalents. We need, desperately, to be told that the second subject gravitates towards the flattened sub-mediant. Here and there, though, in those often ill-treated pages, glimpses of humanity will obstinately persist in breaking out. Here are some occasional gleanings. Hazards: in deepest New Zealand, Eli Goren once started playing a Haydn quartet while the other three members began the obligatory ‘God Save the Queen.’ Sadly neither he nor Bill Pleeth are with us any more to share further memories: Eli Goren died in 2000 aged 76, Pleeth the year before, aged 83. James Barton once absent-mindedly put on his pyjamas in the greenroom before a concert, instead of his white tie and tails. Bruno Schrecker’s braces sometimes consisted of string, Patrick Ireland once had to wear his Au pair girl’s black stockings instead of black socks. Bespectacled Hugh Maguire decided one night his frames needed adjusting and attempted the repair himself: next thing he knew, his spectacles were on fire. And on the personal front: James Barton like Keith Lovell loves messing about in boats and has sailed his way across the Atlantic. Peter Carter lives near the Wimbledon Tennis Courts, loves the game but grumbles that he seldom has time to play. David Roth is into genealogy and once confessed in a programme note that “he has got back to 1714 on one branch of his family, finding several skeletons in the cupboard on the way.” Keith Lovell still preserves – cherishes is not the word – a school report which says that “music alone will get him nowhere.” Peter Thomas has led the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra for many years with great distinction, and also pursues a conducting career. Prunella Pacey worked for a time for handicapped people in three Camphill communities in Scotland, together with her Dutch husband. Bruno Schrecker is a passionate photographer, with several solo exhibitions to his name and examples of his work in the National Portrait Gallery, while Patrick Ireland specialises in carpentry and the repair of antique clocks. The story of Peter Carter’s night in a Canadian prison, though, will have to await.