Milton Court Concert Hall
Rihm – Fetzen I & II (1999-2001 and 2002)
Toshio Hosokawa – Silent Flowers (1998)
Ferneyhough – String Quartet
no.3 (1987)
Birtwistle – Hoquetus Irvinius (2014, world premiere)
Dusapin – String Quartet no.5
(2004-5)
Xenakis – Tetras (1983)
A celebration in style for
the Arditti Quartet: no fewer than three concerts throughout the day. I had
hoped to attend all three, but in the event had to settle for just the evening
concert, which boasted one of three world premieres, the others having been the
third quartets of James Clarke and Hilda Paredes (Bitácora capilar). I also missed hearing works by Jonathan Harvey, Carter,
Kurtág, Lachenmann, Hèctor Parra, Georg Friedrich Haas, and Ligeti. Still, what
I heard offered a Birtwistle premiere, and works by Wolfgang Rihm, Tosho
Hosokawa, Brian Ferneyhough, Pascal Dusapin, and Xenakis, so there remained
plenty to fascinate to thrill, and yes, to beguile. A quartet which, since its
first concert in 1974, has performed and recorded hundreds of new works, many
of them Arditti commissions, has an extraordinary amount to celebrate looking
back, of which this could only be a tiny fraction, but also still to anticipate,
hence the premieres. The concert I heard was typically excellent, no fewer than
six works granted advocacy as impressive as conceivable, indeed arguably more
impressive than conceivable.
Rihm’s Fetzen (‘Scraps’) offered a wonderful ‘overture’, in many ways more
individual than much of the composer’s music I have heard. The first is almost
a mini-concerto, the first violin’s part more than first among equals; it put
me in mind of Berg’s Concerto more than once, and indeed, much of the language
of both seems recognisably post-Schoenbergian, the ‘Peripeteia’ of op.16 also
coming to mind (despite the obvious differences in colour!) Repeated blows of
demarcation bring the short movement to a close. Following a strikingly
frenetic second violin opening, the second piece has the material taken up by
the other instruments of the quartet; ‘mechanism’ at times seems somewhat
Stravinskian, certainly quite a contrast with Fetzen I. The closing chorale, anything but triumphant, provides a
fragile, even ghostly conclusion, the players’ hush not the least of this
performance’s qualities.
Hosokawa’s Silent Flowers proved more abrasive than
lazy Orientalist readings of its title might have suggested; this is certainly
not Takemitsu. There is – and in performance was – a very strong sense of
progression, of, as it were, the lives of these organisms unfolding. Kinship
with Webern and Nono became increasingly apparent, though the work is – perhaps
unsurprisingly – more expansive than the music of the former. The role of
silences as well as quiet playing is particularly noticeable: one was, as with
Nono and indeed Webern, made to listen. In the composer’s words, ‘Sounds also
come from and return to silence.’
Ferneyhough’s third quartet
concluded the first half. The expressivity, again not un-Schoenbergian of its
febrile opening would persist throughout, making one listen again, albeit in a
very different way. In a truer sense than the debased ‘neo-Romantic’ has sadly come
to mean, and as remarked upon by Ralf Ehlers, this work, like Ferneyhough’s
œuvre more generally, could readily be understood to stand as an idealistic
heir to German Romanticism. There was irrationality, yes, but it was
irrationality that was anything but ‘arbitrary’; Ehlers spoke of exactitude in
notation that was yet akin to ‘notated rubato’. As with Schoenberg, something
akin to the ‘Idea’ was the thing. Solo passages – for instance, the second
violin at the opening of the second movement, the scintillating viola at its
close – were as ‘expressive’ in their communication as the complex, yet never
unduly complex, whole. Yes, as the composer put it, ‘the second movement
explodes into an iridescent flood of irate images.’
Birtwistle’s Hoquetus Irvineus, dedicated to ‘Irvine
and his lovely boys’, proved a winning pièce
d’occasion with which to open the second half. The syncopations of hocket
and something not so very far from post-Stravinskian swing offered an
experience that both drew one in as a listener and was also, quite simply, good
fun. Grinding of typical Birtwistle mechanisms propelled the music along,
leaving one satisfied yet wanting more.
‘Ah yes, said Carnier, lente,
lente, and circumspection, with deviations to right and left and sudden
reversals of course.’ With those words from Beckett’s Mercier et Carnier, Dusapin begins the score of his fifth quartet.
That ‘lente’ is certainly characteristic, though this is not a slowness that tires.
The opening, high-lying first violin lyricism, accompanied by pizzicato from
the others, certainly offered time to enjoy the view, whatever that may be, in
properly Beckett-like fashion uncertain as to the destination, which may not
even have existed. Quiet yet incessant chatter – late inheritance of Xenakis’s
swarms? – offers quite another experience, prior to the relative resolution of
the close.
Finally, Xenakis’s Tetras. From first violin to second
violin to the quartet as a whole, the ‘uncompromising’ – perhaps a cliché by
now, but surely apt in this case – opening proved characteristic of work and
performance as a whole. The combination of novelty and familiarity to scales
and arpeggios suggest a parallel, maybe alien world: more so, arguably, than
the frankly extra-terrestrial ambitions of Stockhausen. One passage sounded as
if it might have been musique concrète;
I had to check that I was indeed listening to a string quartet. This final
performance offered the commanding virtuosity of what, for this ensemble, has
become a repertory piece. Silence at the close had no need to be enforced; it
was the only possible reaction.
