Tired of being asked how they were planning to mark the millennium, the Brodsky Quartet finally dreamed up a plan which cunningly em braces classical tradition while gazing boldly into the future. They invited six contemporary composers to write new pieces based on, or inspired by, one of the six Opus 18 quartets of Beethoven. Then they recorded each quartet alongside its corresponding new piece.
Cabot Hall made a suitable venue for this classical-plus notion, being a venue designed along old-fashioned lines yet stranded out in the futurist-brutalism of Docklands. Behind the Brodskys was a headless, winged statue on a plinth, flanked by orchids in vases, as if an interior designer were trying to create instant classical heritage. It felt as if the event was taking place on the Holodeck of the Starship Enterprise.
Luckily the music spoke eloquently for itself. Incredibly, the Brodsky Quartet was founded 28 years ago, and they play their Beethoven as though delighted to renew their acquaintance with an old friend. This first of three performances comprised quartets three and four, alongside their respective newly-created shadows.
The third quartet is poised, lucid, gently regretful and glowing with elegant contrapuntal voicings. The Brodskys performed it as though it were hovering gracefully several inches off the floor. It seems paradoxical, therefore, that Karen Tanaka's At the Grave of Beethoven should turn what she herself called "probably the most gentle and lyrical work in the set" into a tense expression of doubt and foreboding, apparently because she felt traumatised by news of the war in Kosovo while she was writing it. It was like trying to cling to Beethoven while being stuck in a leaking lifeboat on a stormy sea.
But the Brodskys were happy to have their expectations confounded, which they were once again by Sally Beamish's Opus California, a vividly rhythmic piece stuffed with dive-bombing intervals and pained, angular harmonies. It's like an intense precis of the fourth quartet, the only one Beethoven wrote in a minor key (C minor), though where Beethoven's piece bristles with bright dance rhythms, Beamish's conspicuously doesn't. But as an essay in contrasts, the juxtaposition worked a treat.
As a bonus, the combo returned to play John Taverner's Ikon of Joy and Sorrow, based on Beethoven's Ode to Joy. A droll exercise in mystic Tavernerisms, it made the perfect nightcap.
• The third of the Opus 18 performances is tonight. Box office: 0171 418 2783.
