#39: Surprising discipline

Section 6: Antonin Dvořák – String Quartet Op.96, ii: Lento

Capturing their attitude towards the Lento required us to be much more disciplined than we had anticipated from listening. The familiar linguistic tropes for describing these players’ expressivity — ‘use’ of portamento, tempo modification etc. — were sometimes misleading in practice: we found that impression of constant interventionist activity to be at odds with certain aspects of their performance when we attempted to copy. In particular, we felt that we lacked their ability to hold harmonic tension ‘through’ those local nuances.