Reviews
BOOKS
MATADOR PUBLISHING
Jacksons, Monk & Rowe and the Brodsky Quartet: The Formative Years Jacqueline Thomas
328PP ISBN 9781803133096 MATADOR PUBLISHING £12.99
After two books by violist Paul Cassidy – one about his early life in Derry, the other detailing his 40 years in the Brodsky Quartet – here is his wife, cellist Jacqueline Thomas, to tell us about the first decade of the quartet’s half-century.
It is an astonishing tale and Thomas is surely right to claim primacy as the longest-serving female quartet cellist, although the group as a whole will have to keep going a while longer to beat the Panocha Quartet’s 54 years so far.
The tragic thing is – and Thomas makes this point several times – that in today’s UK with its philistine government, the conditions that created a string quartet with members aged 10 to 12 can never be repeated. You have only to hear a few editions of Desert Island Discs to notice the decline in music education standards.
The miracle took place in the seemingly unlikely location of Middlesbrough, the town on Teesside in North Yorkshire best known for its football. But music was well supported and the Thomas siblings who formed the top and bottom of the then Cleveland Quartet, Michael and Jacqueline, came up via the usual youth orchestra route.
It was a riotous upbringing, with eight children plus a skeleton in the cupboard who revealed himself as an extra half-brother. Dad and Mam were almost over-supportive and the ‘Big House on the Corner’ rang with music from morning to night. One drawback was that Dad thought women could not be creative.