#66: ‘Wait until there’s space’
Section 7: Antonin Dvořák – String Quartet Op.51, ii: Dumka
The pair of demi-semiquavers at the end of b.57 illustrates a type of thinking that often underpins ensemble: our first violinist felt that Hoffmann simply ‘waits until there’s space to play it’. It is hard to express what this means empirically, of course, because this impression is not necessarily even correlated with slower timing, nor is it ‘waiting’ in a conventional sense. (For us it felt more ‘curved’, and somehow non-linear). As a description of the ‘feel’ of the Czech Quartet’s manner here, we found the phrase extremely accurate, and especially useful as a basis for capturing this moment’s character ‘all together’.
