Wigmore Hall
String Quartet no.3, ‘Grido’
Mes Adieux, for string trio
String Quartet no.1, ‘Gran Torso’
String Quartet no.2, ‘Reigen seliger Geister‘
Now in his ninety-first year, Helmut Lachenmann continues to challenge, to confound, to nourish, and to delight. This concert brought home just how much his musique concrète instrumentale has become part of the compositional mainstream, as well as how, dare I suggest, a little of his mellowing and, more broadly, his increasing rapprochement with the tradition that has always preoccupied him. Lachenmann’s complete chamber music for strings was a generous offering indeed, though one at which we as listeners, let alone the players had certainly to work. Rewards were both instant and slow-burning; I find myself, two days later, still remarking on and developing musical thoughts and experiences.
In that accomplishment, the dizzying excellence of the JACK Quartet played, if anything, a still greater part than would usually be the case in performance. These players, of course, never do things by halves. Here we not only had Lachenmann’s entire œuvre for string quartet in a single concert; we not only had it supplemented by the anything-but-slight, more recent (2021-2) Mes Adieux for string trio; this was also a single concert in a day of three, in which audiences – not I – had heard works by Catherine Lamb, Hans Abrahamsen, and Wolfgang Rihm. That would surely have made a difference to how one heard the final instalment: a climax, no doubt, if a daunting one. I wonder whether, though, it would have helped one listen one’s way in. Here, I did to an extent, through the canny placing of the third quartet, ‘Grido’, first. It is anything but easy listening, yet it afforded a more ‘approachable’ opening than chronological ordering would have given.
From the outset, the JACK Quartet gave it with all the security, all the idiomatic command, one might expect from, say, the Takács Quartet in Haydn. Shards of or from German Romanticism were to be discerned even now, though not referentially. What struck me with some power was the total lack of distinction, whether in work or performance, between what once might have been thought ‘extended’ techniques and others: this was, as it were, the resolved palette of the string quartet. Full of melody, breath, emotion, it sounded from the dawn of the twenty-first century as if Schumann had continued to compose, heavily influenced but still more greatly liberated by post-Nono stillness and tranquillity. Relationships between instruments were part of the game, almost as if in Bartók. As music, entirely acoustic, ricocheted around the stage, sure in the knowledge that electronics were not required, it was full of surprises, old and new, not least in its continued ability to sing. In microtonal unison-ish and other interval-ish passages, music swarmed in finely judged redramatisation of an age-old dialectic between freedom and, if not, quite determinism, then unfreedom. Pitches emerged in an almost spectralist – though spectralist it certainly was not – clarity. In this fantastical world, the ever-becoming quality of Romanticism sounded reborn.
Violin, viola, and cello returned to the stage for Mes Adieux. Ironically, its texture sounded thicker at the start and indeed much for what was to come, Lachenmann often keener to employ all voices here at once. Was it more ‘thematic’, to employ a term one might have thought by now had lost all sense, yet did not seem to have? Or was my listening, following so powerful an introduction? I am not entirely clear, but one way or another, that seemed a meaningful way in and around this particular matrix. It was no less magical, absorbing, intense, or inventive. Again like Nono and Webern – or, for that matter, Bruckner – there was so music in the silences, let alone the near-silences, one could have listened to them all night.
In retrospect, the First String Quartet marked a watershed in string quartet writing and performance. Its construction from sounds hitherto unknown in the genre is remarkable in itself, but so is its legacy for what might be expected, relished, and developed by instruments and ensembles. ‘What I want,’ Lachenmann wrote in 1971, the year in which he began its composition, ‘is always the same.’ And hearing these works together, whatever their difficulties, made that clear: ‘art as a foretaste of freedom in an age without freedom’. In the cracks and crevasses between, say, pitch and non-pitch, sound and silence, and in their conversion into the age-old quartet-quality of conversation lay a sometimes difficult, but intensely rewarding ride. Deconstruction and reconstruction of instruments and their sound came more to the fore, but there was a moving aesthetic of care, as well as carefulness, that belied reputation of mere radicalism.
Orpheus reconfigured himself, so as to sing
and dance, if not quite how we knew it, in the Second Quartet’s ‘dance of the blessed
spirits’. Here, it sounded and moved as a response, a revisiting, a further journeying
beyond Lachenmann’s explorations in the Second. Both possessed passages of a
rare, febrile beauty, so long as one listened, yet also a sense of quite how
much was at stake in such play(ing). Spirit shadows cast by flautato strings
and the penetrating, uncompromising musical intelligence behind them;
transformations both gentle and violent; an infinite number, or so it seemed,
of shadings in multiple musical parameters: Lachenmann continued in these and
in an undeniable, if flickering sense of something numinous, even noumenal, to challenge,
to confound, to nourish, and to delight.
Mark Berry