Tippett Quartet, Perth Concert Hall

IT’S tempting to play up the Hollywood connections in the first Perth Festival concert Rosetta Stone Languages by the Tippett Quartet. They were explicit in regarding the concert as a Bernard Herrmann centenary tribute. That was enhanced by the climactic presence and performance of the Psycho Suite for string quartet, which carried the tale of the Tippett four securing permission from Herrmann's widow to have the film score so arranged. Add in the other works in the show, with Miklos Rizso's Second String Quartet and Astor Piazzolla's Psycho tribute tango, replete with shrieking jabs from the shower scene, and the programme seems to have a Rosetta Stone Cheap Hollywood flavour. Once the music started it became clear that, Psycho apart, there was little connection between the big screen and what we were hearing. Rosza's Quartet, though well-crafted, was light years from Hollywood. It was an eclectic piece drawing directly from Bartok in its melodic, rhythmic and harmonic language. But it lacked a vital edge. Piazzolla, as he so often did, went too far in his Four for Tango: it was crude. And as for the Psycho Suite, which the group has made its own, they played it too fast. The great music for the car scene Rosetta Stone German lost its intensity, the music for the Bates Motel lost some of its threat, and Janet Leigh would have to have asked old Norman to stab a lot quicker to keep up with this pace. In the middle was Herrmann's Echoes, a little-known jewel of a piece, a beautiful, elegiac, 20-minute rumination, without a flicker of a screen.