Teaching & Playing

Inner knowledge

Chamber music playing from the violist’s seat

ALAN GEORGE Violist of the Fitzwilliam Quartet for 56 years, chamber music coach and former tutor of viola and chamber music at the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, UK

TECHNIQUE

GLEN T. PHOTOGRAPHY

BORN Newquay, Cornwall, UK

STUDIED WITH Colin Sauer, Sidney Griller, Herbert Downes, Roger Raphael

TEACHES 18–25 and amateurs

S tarting out on a journey within a string quartet can be pretty daunting; it takes some tenacity and grit to try to make a go of it. My quartet, the Fitzwilliam Quartet, was rather thrown into the chamber music world by gaining a residency at the University of York in 1971, shortly after our graduation from Cambridge. This included a bursary to study.

We decided to consult Sidney Griller, who was head of chamber music at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Although we were terrified because he had a reputation for being tough, he took to us and we studied with him weekly for three years, and intermittently after that. His influence on us was huge. He and all the members of the Griller Quartet were solely quartet players and indeed, when the viola player eventually died, the quartet folded; Griller would not countenance a newcomer who hadn’t lived and breathed with the quartet from its inception. Times have changed, of course, but it is worth taking something from this mindset when forming a quartet, or when absorbing a new member, especially with regard to developing a technique geared to cohesive quartet playing.