Villa Lily-Pastré
Saariaho: Terra memoria
Boulez: Livre pour quatuor, Ia, Ib, V
Debussy: String Quartet in G minor, op.10
Yun-Peng Zhao
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| (picture: my own, taken from audience) |
Whilst a concert of string quartet music on a balmy evening in the garden of a Provençal villa might sound idyllic, many would add that there is good reason for outdoor music being largely given by wind rather than string instruments. The Hôtel Maynier d’Oppède having become unavailable, this substitute venue nonetheless offered an excellent setting, the Quatuor Diotima seemingly unfazed by the acoustical and tuning challenges that must have confronted it. The screen placed at the back of the stage doubtless played a part, but so surely did the skill and sangfroid of this ever-excellent ensemble.
Programming was canny, two composers strongly influenced in rather different ways by Debussy, one of whom we lost recently, the other whose centenary we celebrate this year, preceding Debussy’s sole string quartet, for which we are all thankful whilst understanding that the genre was not necessarily for him. Who knows what might have emerged from his ‘late’ style, had it not been abruptly curtailed by death? But then we can say that of so many. Here, on all three counts, we were grateful for what we heard.
Kaija Saariaho’s 2007 Terra memoria marked her second work for quartet, not so much taking up where she had left off with Nymphéa of twenty years earlier as doing something quite different, whilst affirming her love for the expression born of intimacy that characterises so much writing for these forces. If conversation is a quality we attribute above all to the Classical heyday of the quartet, it re-emerged in different guises in all three works, here in comprehending performances that seemed to shape that conversation not only between players but between us and the ‘departed’ to whom the work is dedicated, and also the earth (terra) and memory (memoria) of the title, encapsulating both the composer’s shaping of material – always surprising, yet always apt – and the performers’ shaping of what she in turn offered them. Flashes, memories haunted and perhaps consoled us too. It was difficult not to think of Derridian hauntology, not least in figures flying off the bows that seemed both to owe their being to what we might think of both as spectralism and its spectres and yet confidently also to progress beyond them.
Pierre Boulez was a regular visitor to the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence and led, as cellist Alexis Descharmes reminded us in his spoken introduction to the concert the creation of its Académie. Alas, I never heard him lead conduct here, though I did hear a splendid Berlin Philharmonic concert of Bartók, Ravel, and Boulez in 2009. If Boulez’s presence – haunting in the best sense – continues to mark various aspects of the Festival, it is surely right that in his centenary year we should hear his own music: in this case parts – or, as he preferred, feuillets, (leaves) – of the Livre pour quatuor, an essential Boulezian work-in-progress that, once withdrawn, is now experiencing a welcome renaissance in performance. I long to hear it all – whatever ‘all’ might mean in this context – one day, but in the meantime it would be beyond churlish to complain at the fragments given in scintillating performances such as this. Here, perhaps inevitably, I thought of Webern first, yet also, perversely or otherwise, the late Beethovenian inheritance one might have thought shaken off by the Second Piano Sonata, but which to my ears here endured in that connection, in fragility as well as in fury, of fragments that characterised both work and performance.
Debussy’s ghost might have warned Boulez against such a path, yet he too could not quite escape such a reckoning in his Quartet. It is often slyly bypassed; it would, moreover, be absurd to fail to acknowledge both the charm and method of French, Russian, and other string quartet forebears in composition. Yet in a performance of often astonishing concision, sonata and other ‘old’/’German’ forms worked Debussyan magic not only in their haunting but also in their ambiguity. One could identify them, yet so what? What did they – or better, work and performance – express? For a Festival strongly yet far from exclusively devoted to the lyric arts, it was the melodic lines, their intertwining, and their corrosion of expectations that proved most immediate and, in retrospect, so prophetic of the Saariaho and Boulez works heard first that yet remained, in one sense, yet to come.