Arditti Quartet at 50: Harvey, Milliken, Hosokawa, and Birtwistle, 7 March 2024

Pierre Boulez Saal

Jonathan Harvey: String Quartet no.1 (1977)
Cathy Milliken: In Speak for string quartet (2023, world premiere)
Toshio Hosokawa: Oreksis for piano quintet (2023, world premiere)
Birtwistle: String Quartet: The Tree of Strings (2007)

Irvine Arditti, Ashot Sarkissjan (violins)

Ralf Ehlers (viola)

Lucas Fels (cello) 

Tomoki Kitamura (piano)

On 7 March 1974, the Arditti Quartet gave its first concert at the Royal Academy of Music, music to honour Krzysztof Penderecki on bestowal of an honorary degree. Fifty years later to the day and several changes of personnel later – Irvine Arditti the one constant – the Quartet celebrated at Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal its fiftieth birthday, followed by a reception hosted by the Paul Sacher Stiftung, which also hosts the ensemble’s archive . True to its spirit, here was a mixture of new and newer: two Arditti commissions, Jonathan Harvey’s First String Quartet (the first ever) and Harrison Birtwistle’s The Tree of Strings sandwiching two new commissions from Cathy Milliken and Toshio Hosokawa. 

We do not hear enough of Jonathan Harvey’s music. If that was the case before his death in 2012, it is all the more so now. Reminders such as this can do no harm at all. In a single movement, which, to my ears at least, might possibly have been subdivided into three sections of unequal length, it opened with violin (then viola, then cello) harmonics, melting yet also, like snowflakes, flurrying, becoming stronger: something both fragile and yet primal, the latter especially in the unison melody that emerged and seemed to rule over the Quartet as a whole. It felt like embarking on a magical adventure for composer and performers, the latter tracing and projecting the piece’s expressive contours with typical expertise, as the repertoire piece it must be for them, though without a hint of the routine. Sparks flew later, what in the work of another composer we might characterise here as éclat, but here suggesting something deeper, more fundamental, perhaps even Germanic, acknowledging the composer’s crucial encounter with Stockhausen. Material that emerged from the debris developed in any number of other ways, prior to a third section (?) in which a ghost in the machine, a machine in the ghost, or perhaps both propelled the music on its way. Unifying yet further developing, like the ‘tradition’ to which it perhaps still laid claim, the music yet had no ‘return’ in a sign-off of deft brevity. 

Cathy Milliken’s In Speak immediately sounded, perhaps to state the all-too-obvious, as if arising from different cultural concerns, a proper contrast in programming as well as composition. Almost dance-like at times, with unmistakeable ‘human’ interjections of speech, ghostly whistling, and so on, it seemed to take in a more ‘connected’ world (not that there was anything remotely insular about Harvey) and some sort of dramatic-conceptual stimulus arising therefrom, without that being ‘the point’. There was even, I thought, a hint of celebration. ‘Tradition’, if it still exists at all, has moved on considerably in half a century, not least thanks to the Arditti Quartet. ‘I hear different notes emerging’, ‘punchline’, ‘I dragged’, ‘until he was pushed’, ‘finding the right word’, a concatenation of verbal phrases enabled strings to take over again, in turn inaugurating a slower moving, constantly shifting section. Further musical scampering, almost suggesting a ‘classical’ return of material in ternary form – suggesting, not straightforwardly representing – brought the piece to its conclusion.   

The players were joined by pianist Tomoki Kitamura for Toshio Hosokawa’s Oreksis for piano quintet. Again, this was a very different musical world: not only the soundworld, but procedures, preoccupations, everything. Post-‘impressionist’? Perhaps. Post-Debussy? A somewhat stronger perhaps. But it was not only, or principally, post-anything, however helpful such thoughts may be to gain our initial bearings. Centres of gravity proved very different, lines emerging from them, whilst those centres remained obstinately, strangely alluring. The pianist was not a ‘soloist’, yet had a somewhat different role, seemingly growing from the piano’s different instrumental qualities. (That may sound obvious, but it is far from always the case.) Dreamlike in apparent creation of chords, it built slowly to climaxes that seemed always to be pushed a little further into something beyond. Sliding, slithering lines later seemed liberated from whatever it was that had kept them grounded: new ‘air of another planet’ perhaps? There both are, and are not, new things under our sun(s). Music floated with strange precision, upwards once again, into… 

For the final work on the programme, following the interval, we turned to Birtwistle’s 2007 String Quartet: The Tree of Strings. If one might have found a point of comparison with Harvey’s piece in a ‘frozen’ opening, what struck more forcefully again was the difference from all that had been heard before. There was certainly no question who the composer was—nor how great our loss continues to be. These were not so much musical fractals, as some might musically imagine trees, but rather this sounded as music born of an ancient, far from consoling, ‘then’ as seen, or heard, from ‘now’. Melody, harmony, even gesture were as immediate as in stage works such as Gawain or The Minotaur; there was a similarly keen sense of narrative(s) too, without moving into the realm of representation. Even when occasionally more frenetic, it retained a sense of spareness, of everything counting. A not un-Stravinskian candle continued to burn, even to dance, to rock; yet there was a deeper melancholy that seemed to speak of and from remembered or invented landscapes of a Britain beyond its modern towns and cities (not anti-metropolitan, but rather non-metropolitan) as well as memories of Dowland. (How the composer must have hated the snake-oil-salesmen of ‘Brexit’. How wonderful it would have been to see him give Nigel Farage a piece of his mind, not that Farage would have known what to do with it.) 

Strength persisted, intensified, through techniques seeming to cross the centuries without ever truly being ‘of’ them. Was that a mediaevalism there? If so, it was hardly the point. Compelled, so it seemed, by the music’s inherent drama, the players, one by one, moved from centre stage to new stations around the hall, the spatial quality of the musical landscape confirmed and extended. It was no gimmick, as it might have been for many – was there a less gimmicky composer than Birtwistle? – but rather born of an expressive need. Was there a centre any more? That may be the question of musical, and not only musical, modernity, or at least a question. Does it matter? Others left the hall, Lucas Fels’s cello persisting with gruff integrity that came close to overwhelming. It, or rather this, did matter. 

To read my 2009 interview with Irvine Arditti, ahead of two performances at the Edinburgh Festival, please click here.

Wien Modern (3) - Arditti Quartet: Zorn, Lim, Tonia, Parades, and Kessler

Mozart-Saal, Konzerthaus

John Zorn – The Remedy of Fortune (2014, Austrian premiere)

Liza Lim – The Weaver’s Knot (2013, Austrian premiere)
Lina Tonia – Ennea (2015, world premiere)
Hilda Paredes – Hacia una bitácora capilar (2014, Austrian premiere)
Thomas Kessler – String Quartet, for string quartet with live electronics (2012, Austrian premiere)

Irvine Arditti and Ashot Sarkissjan (violins)

Ralf Ehlers (viola)

Lucas Fels (cello)

 

By default rather than design – although I think it is worth doing more often – I heard all five of these pieces without programme notes, since I had left the Wien Modern programme at my apartment. My experience was often unmediated by anything whatsoever, since I had only heard music by one of the composers, Hilda Paredes, previously, and even then, not this particular piece. Too much can sometimes be made of the virtues of listening with an ‘innocent ear’. An important part of artistic creation and reception is what we bring culturally to the table; we do not need always to reinvent the wheel, or sonata form, or whatever it might be. However, there are real virtues too; I hope that my reactions would not have been different, had I known more about the works and the composers – the performances, needless to say, all seemed excellent – but how can I know?

 

First up was John Zorn’s The Remedy of Fortune. I learned afterwards that it was ‘inspired by Guillaume de Machaut and Béla Bartók’s work’. The title, it seems, is after a poem by Machaut; the work, Zorn’s sixth quartet, unfolds in six tableaux, each of them beginning, in a tribute to Bartók’s Sixth Quartet, mesto. That must, the first time around, have been what I heard as an introduction of sorts: so far, so good. Moreover, the work seemed to unfold in sections as outlined, although I naturally had no idea of the reasoning, nor of the emphasis upon different aspects of ‘romantic love’: hope, pain, ecstasy, and so on. A tonal violin fragment was repeated several times, prior to some quite different material, setting up what seemed like an unpredictable pattern for the rest of the work. Sounds from the past came and went. One pizzicato passage sounded almost balletic, a first violin passage following with shades of Prokofiev, although the music against which it was set certainly had no such shades! At what seemed like the heart was another pizzicato section, certainly seeming to evoke, to imitate, perhaps even to incorporate early music. Involved counterpoint would be followed by simple, diatonic harmony, with much in between too. I am not sure what it all added up to, but, by the same token, could certainly not, on the basis of a single hearing, say that it did not add up.

 

Liza Lim followed, with The Weaver’s Knot, written for the fortieth anniversary of the Arditti Quartet. Her piece was – a welcome thing, this! – shorter than its predecessor. ‘Traditional’ extended techniques, harmonics included (if one can call them extended techniques!), sounded, especially at its opening, surprisingly fresh, even new. There seemed to me far more of a continuous line than in the Zorn piece, however quickly that line might change its quality. Pitches emerged as centres, if only then to be replaced by others. A process of unfolding, not necessarily as one might expect it, seemed to be at the heart; perhaps that was the concept of the ‘knot’ and its untying?

 

Lina Tonia’s Ennea, still shorter, or so it seemed (I am never any good at knowing how long music lasts in seconds, minutes, hours…), emerged as an accomplished work indeed, again from someone with whose music I was entirely unfamiliar. The ‘spiral form’ – as I learned later – had in common with Lim’s work a strong sense of what one might reasonably think of as development and of unexpected, yet far from arbitrary, twists to that development. An arresting opening with high (post-Ligeti?) scurrying immediately instilled the sense of not knowing where the music might lead. Lucas Fels’s cello continued to offer something different: both from the violins and viola, and from its earlier, reinventing self. A long, quite viola note (Ralf Ehlers), perhaps with a reminiscence, at least for me, of Nono, led to reinvigorated, even violent scurrying. I should certainly like to hear more from Tonia.

 

Finally, in the first half: Paredes’s Hacia una bitácora capilar, a shorter version, as again I would learn afterwards, of another 40^th anniversary Arditti work, Bitácora capilar. The players’ performance certainly seemed to speak of knowing the material inside out: performed as a ‘classic’, as other quartets might perform Brahms. There seemed, to my ears, to be a strong sense of harmony and harmonic progression, although the harmonies themselves were rarely over-familiar, or expected. Likewise, the sense of musical narrative, not necessarily to be translated into words or images, though not necessarily not so to be translated, sounded strongly throughout, both in work and performance. Textures were varied, yet always sounded as if they took their leave from a greater whole.

After the interval, came the one work with electronics: Thomas Kessler’s 2013 String Quartet. I have still not consulted the programme note, but shall do so after writing. Ghostly – in the sense of the past and of something akin to the spirit world – opening electronics sounded initially an intriguing idea that a more tonal realm might be that of modern Klangregie, whilst the venerable string quartet sounded more of the present. And yet, that relationship did not remain constant, apparently subjected to all manner of twists and turns: the well-worn metaphor of a journey sprang again to mind. Intervals sounded with stronger tonal implications than I might have suspected they intrinsically had; I was not sure how or why that was accomplished, yet again, it intrigued. Electronic manipulation of ‘old’ harmonies and incessant instrumental ‘interference’ put me in mind of an old radio broadcast. And then, quickly, there was something else entirely; or was it? At any rate, there seemed to be no resting upon laurels, upon easy assumptions. Materials seemed re-examined, re-imagined, almost like Lachenmann, but in a less overtly didactic fashion; indeed, I sensed no didacticism at all. Perhaps there was an irony in that the traditional pattern of what sounded as the ‘weightiest’ – that is not necessarily to say the ‘best’, though equally, it is not to say that it was not, either – work was placed as the culmination of the concert. Much, then, to think about, in another splendidly impressive Arditti Quartet performance. And yes, I should be eager to hear more of Kessler’s music.

 

'The Arditti Quartet: 40 Years Young’ – Rihm, Hosokawa, Ferneyhough, Birtwistle, Dusapin, and Xenakis, 26 April 2014

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)

Irvine Arditti, Ashot Sarkissjan (violins)

Ralf Ehlers (viola)

Lucas Fels (cello) 

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.

 

Sixtieth birthday concert for Irvine Arditti, 16 October 2013

Wigmore Hall

 

Ferneyhough – Intermedia alla ciaconna

Robert HP Platz – strings (Echo VII) (UK premiere)
Hilda Paredes – Cuerdas del destino (UK premiere)
Francisco Guerrero – Zayin I + II
Cage – Eight Whiskus
Akira Nishimura – String Quartet no.5, ‘Shesha’ (world premiere)

Irvine Arditti, Ashot Sarkissjan (violins)

Ralf Ehlers (viola)

Lucas Fels (cello)

 

To say that the world of contemporary music owes Irvine Arditti and the Arditti Quartet an incalculable debt, whilst true, somewhat misses the point; we might be better to say that of the world of music. The Ardittis occasionally venture back even beyond Schoenberg; indeed, I heard them play Beethoven in Edinburgh, and, in an interview with me shortly before those performances, Arditti referred to Bach and Brahms too. But it is the twin abilities to present classics, albeit mostly of the twentieth century, as contemporary, and to present new works in a manner both excitingly of the moment and with all the insight that one might expect, say, the Amadeus Quartet to lavish on Mozart, that really counts.

 

Ferneyhough’s Intermedio alla ciaccona is a classic by Arditti’s and indeed by anyone’s standards. Twenty-seven years after he gave its 1986 premiere, Arditti ensured that it remained as visceral and as musical an experience as ever. Its ‘fictional polyphony’, to employ the composer’s term, immediately has one think of Bach’s great solo violin example: Bach refracted, in a sense descended from, or at least relatable to, Webern’s great orchestration of the Ricercar from the Musical Offering, yet also quite different, violently so – and of course an entirely new composition. A kaleidoscope of expression unfurls itself nevertheless through the means of a single instrument, within a strong, indeed awe-inspiringly strong, modernist frame. Arditti’s sovereign command as a performer had one believe this to be an experience akin to what I imagine hearing Milstein play Bach might have been. For me, this was perhaps the greatest highlight of a typically exploratory evening.

Robert HP Platz’s 2008 work, strings (Echo VII) received its first British performance. The quartet members gradually enter, one by one, Arditti first, the spatial conceit being their placing around the hall, only the first violin and the cello on stage. In the composer’s words, the piece ‘is a portrait of the four characters in a string quartet, each in his own space, his own time, like four galaxies in polyphonic space, four universes of a meta-universe, to be described by the theory of “strings”.’ I admit that I am not entirely sure what is meant by ‘the theory of “strings”,’ but anyway. It opens with relative reticence and indeed it takes the cello’s entry for the music to turn to what, with doubtless undue Romanticism, I might gingerly call more a passionate tone. Despite spatial separation, or in a sense through its offices, the instruments combine even to the extent of completing each other’s phrases. (Again, I thought of Webern.) It was not quite clear to me what the spatial element added; not that there was anything to which to object. But it was not quite Stockhausen either.

Hilda Parades’s Cuerdas del destino (2007-8) also received its British premiere. From the éclat of its opening pizzicati, via an array of expressive devices such as glissando tremolo and harmonics, and a succession of contrasting types of musical material, this made for a vivid, at times almost, though only almost, pictorial journey. There is a palpable sense of drama to the work – as there was to the quartet’s committed performance. The concluding section seemed both old – recognisable material from what had gone before – and new, that material being employed in different ways. It registered almost as a translation of a cyclical symphonic principle to the world of the contemporary string quartet: not entirely unlike the Arditti Quartet’s very raison d’être.

Francisco Guerrero’s Zayin cycle of seven pieces for string trio, written over the period 1983 to 1997, has yet to be performed in its entirety in this country. The first two pieces certainly made a powerful impression, whetting the appetite for more, the powerful energy inherent in both works and performances offering something of a revelation. Motor rhythms, post-Stravinskian in the best sense, offer again an array of expressive possibilities. At one point, the way in which the instruments seemed, as it were, to be pedalling uphill offered an analogy with which to grasp the music’s progression, but the best thing perhaps, especially on a first hearing, was simply to surrender. The virtuosity and musicality unleashed in performance were second to none.

Arditti then performed a solo work that could hardly have been more contrasted had it been taken from a much earlier century; arguably Cage’s Eight Whiskus is still more contrasted than, say, Bach or Biber. Apparently it follows on from an original version for voice, which Cage, in consultation with the violinist Malcolm Goldstein, reworked so that ‘the vowel and consonant qualities of the poem are transformed into various bowing positions, gradations of bowing pressure, and forms of articulation’. A fascinating idea, no doubt, yet what struck me was the apparently disarming simplicity of the piece: probably an illusion, but maybe not. I do not think, moreover, it was fanciful to glean some sense of translation from words to violin technique, even when one had no idea what the original text was.

Finally came the world premiere of Akiraa Nishimura’s firth string quartet, written to commemorate Arditti’s sixtieth birthday and dedicated to him. ‘Shesha’ refers, in the composer’s words, ‘to the name of a gigantic snake with thousands of heads , which appears in the Indian myth. It lives beneath the ground and supports the earth. Shesha’s awakening means the earth’s awakening.’ Indeed, without at the time having read the note, I sensed something of a kinship in the first section, that of Shesha’s awakening, to The Rite of Spring, intense and teeming with life. The apparent Romanticism – a relative term, I admit – of what followed was certainly impressive in terms of the Arditti Quartet’s performance, but sounded perhaps slightly as a reversion, even if one could hardly say to what. Perhaps, though, that was the point, as the second and third sections evoked ‘Samudra manthan’ (the churning of the ocean of milk) and ‘Amrita’ (the nectar of immortal life). What seemed as though it might be the still centre of the work actually proved to be its conclusion: an interesting confounding of expectations, even if those expectations were only mine. At any rate, the concert left us in no doubt that both Irvine Arditti and the quartet that bears his name will continue both to exceed and to confound our expectations.
 

Prom 5: Arditti Qt/Bamberg SO/Nott - Lachenmann and Mahler, 15 July 2013

Royal Albert Hall

Lachenmann – Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied (British premiere)

Mahler – Symphony no.5

Arditti Quartet

Bamberg Symphony Orchestra

Jonathan Nott (conductor)

 

 

Given the stalwart service of the BBC in the cause of new music, I was astonished to learn that this was the first time any of Helmut Lachenmann’s music had been programmed at the Proms. Better late than never, I suppose, and it certainly came in a provocative coupling, his Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied with Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. It made a great deal of sense, of course, given Lachenmann’s preoccupation with re-examination of tradition, and specifically German tradition. Yet depressingly, a quick perusal of Youtube comments on the piece betrays the sort of reaction the composer is still likely to face in some quarters: ‘It has nothing to do with music, it is nothing but rubbish,’ writes one ‘Utz Beahre’, in response to the question without question-mark posed by ‘jonnyrs1’: ‘could someone please explain to me what the hell this has to do with music!! Thank God for Mahler 5 at the Proms!!’ Whatever complaints we might all have with concerning the BBC, at least it has not entirely capitulated to such boorish, ignorant philistinism.

 

For the Arditti Quartet, the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, and Jonathan Nott offered an outstanding performance: just the sort of advocacy that ought to convince anyone willing to listen rather than merely to hurl a priori abuse. We all know that Lachenmann can provoke, though never for the sake of mere provocation; here, he was shown to scintillate, to beguile, and perhaps above all, to dance, indeed foot-tappingly so. The lengthy opening passage for quartet alone – played, as throughout with pin-point precision, though far more than just precision – offered a mini-compendium of the players’ superlative extended techniques. As often in the Royal Albert Hall, and despite coughing, even talking, intimate music drew one in, made one listen. Then came the orchestral call and the highly rhythmical pizzicato section it unleashed in our latter-day concerto grosso. It was less Bach, let alone Vivaldi, summoned up, though, than the ghost of what must rank as Schoenberg’s zaniest piece, the Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra, after Handel. Lachenmann, however, goes far beyond Schoenberg as inventor, ushering us in to a veritable workshop – somehow the German Werkstatt seems more apt – of ideas. A workshop, be it noted, not a laboratory: craft, rather than positivistic science, is celebrated here, as it was in the scintillating performance. Shards of earlier music make their presence felt, not entirely dissimilar to Berio’s practice, though arguably less conciliatory. A tapped rhythm put me in mind of the Baroque passacaglia, whether or no that were actually ‘intended’. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio offers epiphany of its own, whilst ‘O du lieber Augustin’ inevitably registers not only as itself but as a reminder of Schoenberg’s scorned usage in his Second String Quartet, a reference that surely had particular resonance for such fine exponents as the Arditti Quartet. But was that Mahler in the orchestra, or was it merely my fancy? Was there even the ghost of an oom-pah band, that in itself perhaps a reference to Bernd Alois Zimmemann. Even in 1979-80, when daggers really ought to have been drawn with Henze, was there an unconscious note of affinity, betokening a shared disturbance with respect to German musical tradition, when the raucous, even raunchy dance-music threatened to shade almost into a reminiscence of Boulevard Solitude Stan Kenton jazz? Lachenmann asks such questions, or permits us to ask them, without definitely providing answers. In that, he is most certainly and emphatically a German Composer.  The players demonstrated the necessity of a great performance; I have heard Lachenmann almost killed under a lesser conductor (Sylvain Cambreling). Here, music drew upon its historical inheritance of fantasy, caprice, even whimsy, without a hint of sentimentality; and aptly, it did so under the auspices of an orchestra from Bamberg, the city that escaped Allied bombing. The still, almost glacial, conclusion seemed to breathe purer air once again; for me, on this occasion, it was the ‘Adagio’ to the Hammerklavier Sonata that came to my mind. If Beethoven still lives, then so does music.

 

I was worried that the performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony might suffer by comparison. Not a bit of it: Nott and the Bamberg SO proved just as outstanding as they had in Lachenmann. The opening tattoo (Markus Mester) was purposeful, even militant, with a finely-judged move into string foreboding. (It was at that point that I realised the tone of the Bamberg strings was reminding me of the Czech Philharmonic of old: perhaps no mere coincidence, given that it was formed in 1946 by German refugees, fleeing the ethnic cleansing of the Beneš Decrees.) Gorgeous yet baleful woodwind evoked Mozart and an idealised village band in almost equal measure. All the while, the cortège continued its progress. Nott’s command of line never failed him, whether in this first movement or elsewhere: a signal achievement in itself in what remains a very difficult symphony indeed to carry off convincingly. And how the players turned their phrases! Not narcissistically, but charged with tragic, musical meaning. Lilt and rubato sounded effortlessly ‘natural’; Mahler was clearly under their skin. Nott proved equally adept at the phantasmagorical skill of turning a corner, revealing a new vista, and yet needing to offer no reminder that this remained the same movement, the same work. The conclusion, not least Ulrich Biersack’s hopeless flute solo, duly chilled. To that, there came a furious attacca response. Mood-swings were more intense in this second movement, yet line remained unbroken. I was put in mind of Rafael Kubelík’s Mahler, a slightly more modernistic sheen certainly not eclipsing the depth of ‘tradition’ in a good sense. Dialectics, then, abounded, as they should, indeed must. Death himself – Himself? – danced, reminding us of Lachenmann, yet danced still more seductively, the violin solo (an excellent Baer Vandenbogaerde) inevitably bringing to mind Mahler’s preceding symphony. Those echt-Mahlerian marionettes, unholy offspring of Berlioz and Nietzsche, menaced, yet charmed. This was a movement terrifying through its musicality, not through the all-too-easy path of external ‘effect’. It was not least for that reason that the chorale sent shivers down the spine, even though – perhaps because – we knew its ‘triumph’ would prove hollow. Mahler’s return to the Inferno seemed but a stone’s throw from the terror of his Sixth Symphony.

 

The scherzo opened with articulation as fine and as warm as one might have hoped for in an ‘old school’ Haydn performance. (Think of Furtwängler in the 88^th.) Gemütlichkeit, needless to say, gave way to ambiguous marionettes, doused in a mixture of Bach and acid, working their nihilistic magic. This movement, then, proved properly full of irreconcilables; indeed, it overflowed with them. And yet – it made sense. Counterpoint was both full and empty, sometimes simultaneously. The awestruck stillness, which yet continued to offer motion, of the trio offered Schubertian longing (the Unfinished Symphony in particular) in its shadow, rendering the reprise of the scherzo an absolute necessity. Such extremity of effort would not of course be resolved here; the battle nevertheless engrossed, riveted, terrified.

 

Nott played the Adagietto as it works best, as a declaration of love, rather than a feast of maudlin onanism. It was beautiful, tender, yet without a hint of self-regard. If fanciers of Visconti’s wretched filmic treatment still exist, the reading might be likened to a Tadzio upon whom Aschenbach had not so much as laid eyes. More importantly, it consoled and moved us through musical  understanding, a true command of harmonic rhythm obviating any perceived need for imposition of irrelevant ‘personality’. And my goodness, the emotional, physical charge those Bamberg strings elicited! One could actually fancy that this represented love as Mahler might have conceived of it: unfathomably complex, yet devastatingly sincere. The follow on of the finale was, once again, judged perfectly. It exhibited welcome sparkle, even lightness, though that should not be taken to indicate lack of depth. Good humour is not a trivial thing, certainly not in Mahler, and these things are without doubt highly relative here in any case. Should one take seriously the ‘battle’ between Brandenburg-counterpoint and mockery of ‘high intellect’? It was not the least of Nott’s even-handed yet committed approach that one never quite knew. Detail was keenly observed, yet he never mistook trees for the wood. Shadows continued to haunt: how could it be otherwise when the undergrowth was as variegated as here?

 

Arditti Quartet, JACK Quartet - Clarke, Mincek, Pelzel, and Lanza, 6 May 2013

Wigmore Hall

James Clarke – 2012-S, for two string quartets (2012, British premiere)

Alex Mincek – String Quartet no.3, ‘lift – tilt – filter – split’ (2009-10, London premiere)
Michael Pelzel - ... vers le vent ... (2010, British premiere)
Mauro Lanza – Der Kampf zwischen Karneval und Fasten, for eight strings (2012, British premiere)

 

Irvine Arditti, Ashot Sarkissjan (violins)
Ralf Ehlhers (viola)
Lucas Fels (cello)

Christopher Otto, Ari Streisfeld (violins)

John Pickford Richards (viola)
Kevin McFarland (cello)

 

A hurricane had prevented the Arditti Quartet and the JACK Quartet from coming together in November to present these two British premieres from James Clarke and Mauro Lanza. The Ardittis had nevertheless presented a programme of four quartets, one of them as shockingly old as to date from 2002-3, again a Clarke work, his first string quartet. Now we heard the postponed premieres, plus two more: Alex Mincek’s third string quartet (a London premiere, anyway) and Michael Pelzel’s ... vers le vent ....

 

Clarke’s 2012-S is written for two string quartets rather than a string octet, the point being the relationship between the two quartets, who sometimes play together, but at others pass material between each other, transform it, or, in the composer’s term, ‘contradict’ it. The quartets might, for instance, play at slightly different speeds, ‘all ... precisely written and timed’. Effort seems very much part of the sound – and the meaning? There is real violence in the conversation, and yet, even if at some remove, the quartet convention of ‘conversation’ seems to remain – as it did in this fine performance. Polyphony, even cacophony, is part of the extremity, and yet a sense of unity remains, almost akin to older homophony, and not only in the lengthy sustaining chords whose obvious contrast lies with much faster material.

 

Alex Mincek’s third quartet, ‘lift – tilt – filter – split’, concerns itself at one level with representation, in the composer’s words, of ‘physical shape, tactility, and movement’, the listener being permitted ‘to bounce back and forth from the recognition of the unique parts and the undifferentiated whole’. Near, though not total, identity, may often be found between one phrase and the next, but change, be it in ‘composite rhythm’, timbre, pitch, and register content, nevertheless occurs; there is not the slightest sense of static. Insofar as I was able to tell, the JACK Quartet captured that process very well indeed, proving fine advocates for the work. The performance opened as if on a coiled spring,  with tight rhythmic focus and attack. Quasi-echoes in harmonics offered a contrasting soundworld, as did the scurrying of high violins, perhaps echoing, if only accidentally, certain string writing of Schoenberg, which one might trace back at least as far as Verklärte Nacht. There was, in what seemed to me a clever piece of programming, a continued yet different sense of Either/Or – and not just on account of Kierkegaard’s bicentenary, celebrated the day previously. It may not be uncommon for a quartet, or indeed for chamber music more generally, to conclude by disappearing, as it were, into the ether, but this provides a spellbinding example.

 

Michael Pelzel’s string quartet, ... vers le vent..., was performed by the Ardittis. In three movements, it is perhaps in some senses more ‘traditional’. According to Pelzel, the first movement is intended to depart from the idea of ‘a passacaglia on a rhythmic ground with figurative variations, steadily digressing from its original idea until culminating in a homophonic line with great energetic intensity.’ There was certainly that sense of departure in the performance we heard, indeed from the very opening, viola answered by cello. The second movement offered a ‘frozen’ opening, vertiginous harmonics melting to a certain degree thereafter; Pelzel thinks of it as similar to ‘a film in which different narratives unfold simultaneously,’ but also draws attention to its role as something of a slow introduction to the third movement, ‘a scintillating, filigree and virtuoso “Toccata volubile”.’ The quality of a perpetuum mobile in contemporary terms was one that struck me before having seen the composer’s notes. There was, both in work and performance, perhaps even something of the quality of a latter-day Haydn, or better Bartók, finale: tradition present, but reimagined.   

 

Both quartets came together for the British premiere of Mauro Lanza’s Der Kampf zwischen Karneval und Fasten, inspired in some sense by Breugel’s depiction of the battle between feasting and fasting, which is broadened, as Lanza points out, to a conflict between ‘meat and fish ..., winter and spring, tavern and church, whose literary pendant can be the battle between [the monster] Quaresmeprenant and the army of sausages in Rabelais’s Quart Livre.’ Punctuating chimes – I could see neither where they were, nor who sounded them – and more than a little reminiscence, especially early on, from Lanza’s work with electronics at IRCAM made their presence felt. So did a slow sense of progression, more so, at least to my ears, than the dualism signalled in the title, which would certainly have provided continuity with works in the first half. I am sure the problem was mine, but confess that I did not find the work, however excellently performed, as compelling as its title might have suggested, at least until its rather magical coda-like conclusion, more delicate, fragile even. A second hearing would doubtless reveal more of the dialectic to which the composer appeals.  

Arditti Quartet - Clarke, Abrahmsen, Saunders, and Rihm, 31 October 2012

Wigmore Hall

 

James Clarke – String Quartet no.1 (2002-3)

Hans Abrahmsen – Quartet no.4 (2012, United Kingdom premiere)
Rebecca Saunders – Fletch (2012, United Kingdom premiere)
Wolfgang Rihm – String Quartet no.13 (2011)

Irvine Arditti and Ashot Sarkissjan (violins)
Ralf Ehlers (viola)
Lucas Fels (cello)

 

Hurricane Sandy necessitated alterations to the programme of this concert. The New York-based JACK Quartet’s absence entailed postponement of the British premieres of James Clarke’s 2012-S for two string quartets and Mauro Lanza’s Der Kampf zwischen Karneval und Fasten for octet. In their place came Clarke’s first string quartet and Wolfgang Rihm’s thirteenth. Two British premieres, then, rather than four, but all the works were new to me, and Clarke’s work was the outlier in being almost a decade old.

Its arresting opening proved typically uncompromising in its violence. Considerable use is made of glissandi, post-Xenakis buzzing, glassy harmonics: but this is no mere catalogue of effects. Themes, if I may call them that, or motifs are flung between the four parts with visceral abandon – as they were in the Arditti Quartet’s commanding performance. Dogged insistence and something akin to variation were revealed as two sides of the same coin, a ‘duet’ between two violins almost beguiling, likewise its successor for viola and cello. And yes, this ultimately proved conversational in a quartet tradition one might trace back to its founder, Haydn.

 

Hans Abrahamsen’s fourth string quartet was commissioned in 2010 but took twenty years to write. I wish I could say I thought it worth the wait. Again, there is an arresting opening: high solo first violin harmonics intoning a chorale-like tune. Joined by the second violin, then the viola, and then very briefly the cello, all using harmonics, the process is repeated. A second hearing, then, though of course in knowledge of what has passed before. I was intrigued by dim echoes of Bartók and perhaps even the viol consort in the opening of the second movement, before it settled down into a quasi-minimalist mode of expression whose mild motor rhythms and tonal harmony sounded more suited to a television film score than a stand-alone concert piece. The third movement consciously echoes the first, or rather mirrors it, opening with a cello pizzicato solo passage, joined by viola (again pizzicato), and so on upwards, rounded off, again very briefly, with an utterance sul ponticello by the first violin. The process, again, is repeated. Likewise the fourth movement echoed the second, apparently ‘planned,’ according to the composer, ‘as a dark and heavy counterpart but it turned out to be like “babbling” music of a child’. Though I clearly was not on Abrahamsen’s wavelength, there could be no faulting the response of the Arditti players, as committed here as elsewhere.

 

Rebecca Saunders’s Fletch concluded the first half in what sounded to me far more typical Arditti territory. In the composer’s words:

Fletch, n. (archery); the feather placed on the arrow, providing it with the capacity of flight; the feathered vane towards the back of the arrow, used to stabilise during flight. Fletch is a furious ongoing exploration of a specific physical gesture and fragment of sound.

The physical quality of tone was vividly, viscerally communicated in work and performance. Glissandi, rapid crescendo, trills, and more combined to far more than the sum of their parts, betokening a fascinating exploration of the instruments and their capabilities as much as performing techniques. There was on a first hearing a satisfying formal arc, or perhaps better progression, which put me in mind – how or why, I cannot quite explain – of a neo-Lisztian symphonic poem. It was an instinctive reaction, doubtless, but perhaps that was in keeping with the physical immediacy of the piece.

 

Rihm’s thirteenth quartet had the second half to itself. It sounded as if from another world, or planet, its post-Bergian harmonic language and motivic development more ‘traditional’, though none the worse for that. Formal propulsion clearly grew out of the material with a rhythmic insistency that perhaps owed something to Stravinsky, even to Henze. The one-movement formal compression inevitably evoked echoes of Schoenberg, though the concentration rarely seemed as extreme as his. A chorale-like passage – again! – was played with neo-Romantic abandon, revelling in the richness of its harmonisation. Developing variation, its roots in Schoenberg and Brahms, still has a great deal to impart.

Arditti Quartet - Nancarrow and Ligeti, 22 April 2012

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Nancarrow – String Quartet no.1
Ligeti – String Quartet no.2
Nancarrow – String Quartet no.3
Nancarrow (arr. Paul Usher) – Player Piano Study no.33

Irvine Arditti, Ashot Sarkissjan (violins)
Ralf Ehlers (viola)
Lucas Fels (cello)

This concert was the last event in a full weekend of events at the Southbank Centre, entitled, ‘Impossible Brilliance: The Music of Conlon Nancarrow’. It may seem perverse to have attended only a concert without player piano music, but such was what my schedule allowed, and I was keen to hear at least something. Nevertheless, it was a pity to have missed the complete studies for player piano and a London Sinfonietta concert that programmed Nancarrow with Cage, Ligeti, and James Tenney, not to mention the parallel-running conference.

Though Nancarrow wrote three string quartets, the second is apparently not only unfinished but also unperformable. If that sounds like a challenge waiting to be surmounted, then we should doubtless bear in mind that the Arditti Quartet is not known for flinching in the face of such challenges. The first quartet is an early work, written just before the composer’s turn away from live performers. I was struck by the tonal characteristics of its harmony, as well as the harbingers of things to come: canon, of course, but also simultaneous use of different tempos. What registered perhaps most strongly, both in terms of work and performance, was the primacy of rhythm, its propelling force of liberation undeniable, though the relative repose of the second movement nurtured a melodic gift to a degree one might almost consider ‘conventional’, were that not so loaded a term. Nancarrow apparently showed the work to the Ardittis at the greatly-missed Almeida Festival in London, and the players, to the composer’s astonishment, sight-read it without obvious difficulty. There was certainly no impression here of anything other than a quartet in the bones of the players.

Ligeti’s astonishing second quartet followed, doubtless a tribute to Ligeti’s role in bringing Nancarrow and his music to greater attention, though this 1968 work was written more than a decade before Ligeti encountered the composer’s music (1980). This again is prime Arditti territory. Correspondences between Ligeti and Nancarrow were evident in context, though as Tim Rutherford-Johnson notes in the programme, ‘whilst Nancarrow de-mechanised his music when writing for string quartet, Ligeti sought to mechanise it.’ That said, and whilst one noted the use of canon as an obvious point in common, Ligeti’s music, even when mechanised, above all in ticking third movement, Come uno meccanismo de precisione, sounded wondrously free. Clocks and clouds worked their magic in what must surely rank as one of the greatest successors to Bartók and Webern in the twentieth-century quartet repertoire. This was every bit as fine a performance as that I heard from the Arditti Quartet at the 2009 Edinburgh Festival.

Nancarrow’s Third, described by Rutherford-Johnson as ‘possibly Nancarrow’s most significant statement for live performers’, received an equally thrilling performance. There could be no doubt that this was mature Nancarrow, despite the ‘concessions’, for want of a better word, necessary to render it playable. Once again the primacy of rhythm and canonic writing was audible for the most naïve of first-time listeners. Yet, at a certain point, one could hardly fail also to register the use of other, more obvious ‘string-based’ techniques, and more importantly their expressive content: the harmonics of the second movement, for instance. The music hurtles along, threatening to break down, but never once did it do so in performance from the group for which it was written. Finally, we heard Paul Usher’s transcription for string quartet of Nancarrow’s Study no.33. Its irrational tempo ratio (2:√2) renders, so far as any of us can imagine, ‘straight’ transcription impossible, let alone its performance by ‘live’ musicians. Apparently, a decision was made therefore ‘to work towards a “best fit” rather than complete accuracy’. Perhaps purists would say that defeats the purpose; perhaps it does. I can simply report, as anything but a Nancarrow expert, that the result in live performance was exhilarating. If anything, I found myself still more caught up in the progress of the Ardittis’ performance than I had in the Nancarrow quartets themselves. The variety of texture was certainly as striking as that in the co-ordination – and otherwise! – of the third quartet.

Ferneyhough String Quartet no.6

I was surprised - and delighted - to find the Ferneyhough quartet (given its London premiere last night) on YouTube:

Arditti Quartet - Premieres of Clarke, Ferneyhough, Fujikura, and Paredes, 3 February 2011

Wigmore Hall

James Clarke – String Quartet no.2 (2009, London premiere)
Brian Ferneyhough – String Quartet no.6 (2010, London premiere)
Dai Fujikura – Flare (2010, world premiere)
Hilda Paredes – Canciones Lunáticas (2009, world premiere of complete work)

Irvine Arditti and Ashot Sarkissjan (violins)
Ralf Ehlers (viola)
Lucas Fels (cello)


In a better, let alone ideal, world, more concert programmes would resemble this. New music, performed by musicians at the height of their powers, would stand at the very heart of musical life, as was the case until not so very long ago. There would remain plenty of opportunities for forays into the museum of the past, but it would never be permitted to overwhelm contemporary musical production. Some works would be better than others of course, but an acceptance of risk – goodness knows, we risk enough mediocre or poor performances of, say, Tchaikovsky symphonies from our major orchestras! – would accept that. Doubtless this would all be decried by many as madness commensurate with that depicted in the verse of Pedro Serrano, set in Hilda Paredes’s Canciones lunáticas, but it need not be so; nor has it been for most of our musical history.

Back to the grey reality of late capitalist society, however. James Clarke’s second quartet here received its London premiere, the first performance having taken place in 2009 at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. The programme note hinted at why Clarke might not be the most readily accepted prophet in his own country:

The composer has written: ‘It is a quality of music and some of the visual arts that they do not communicate ideas in the same area as words. The substance is different. I prefer to allow the music to make a statement on its own terms and to avoid as much as possible the descriptive (including titles). … I believe that to attempt to describe the impulse or “inspiration” behind a work is to detract from its enigmatic potential and undermine the directness of its power.’

Fair enough: it is a perfectly respectable, though not incontestable, point of view. However, it does not necessarily help a naïve listener get to grips with unfamiliar music. It might not therefore have been entirely unreasonable to have had someone else contribute a note. It did mean, though, that one could, indeed must, listen more or less without prejudice. I had certainly never heard the work before, and I doubt that most in the audience would have done so, though, given the apparent preponderance of ‘contemporary music enthusiasts’, I suspect a few had. The opening impression was of intense drama, relative extremes of instrumental range navigated by rather appealing, rapid, quasi-scalic figuration. Considerable use of harmonics soon imparted a suggestion, though only that, of electronic means. (It is perhaps worth noting how in many works the suggestion of such can be at least as interesting as the ‘real thing’.) Violence was certainly present, but it never seemed to be there for its own sake, likewise the use of extended techniques: rhetorical, yet idiomatic. Silences appeared to play an important structural and expressive part, at times reminding me of Nono. Repeated notes and their treatment took on an increasingly pivotal role too. This may have been ‘complex’ music but it bore an overpowering sense of direction. There was, moreover, within Clarke’s personal idiom, a real sense of interaction between the four instrumentalists: that is, ‘proper’ quartet writing.

Ferneyhough is another English composer more sung on what we still sometimes refer to as ‘the Continent’ than upon this Sceptred Isle. Here, the composer’s note was certainly informative, though I can imagine its density of expression – surely, not least a parallel to Ferneyhough’s music – eliciting a dismissive chortle from would-be bluff English ‘empiricists’. Give them a good dose of Hegel to read! Much of the composer’s recent work has sought to reconsider how ‘awareness of temporal space can be heightened or redefined by staging a discrepancy of adequation between the emplacement and unfolding of sonic materials and the time available for their individual reception’. This sixth quartet in a sense takes that process further, and, according to the composer, overlaps and embeds fragments ‘so as to create an unpredictable tangle of conflicting materials and time frames’. In practice, I was actually less sure. Yes, there was tangling; much of this is relative, after all. However, I fancied at least that I could perceive different characters to the musical fragments, as well as in their interaction. The latter was, perhaps, more the thing, though, in that the toing-and-froing – that makes it sound rather milder than it is – of musical ideas appeared generative of the composer’s trademark complexity. Process as well as result at the very least sounded discernible or imaginable, doubtless in part a tribute to the superlative performances, here as elsewhere, from the Arditti Quartet. Melody, and I really could not conceive of why one should not call it that, took on many forms: an extended solo for the first violin, here mesmerizingly performed by Irvine Arditti, and a surprising unison passage, as well as a more typical near-overload of melodic profusion, redolent in its way of some of Schoenberg’s writing.

Dai Fujikura’s Flare was a Wigmore Hall co-commission, with the rupport of André Hoffmann. Other co-commissioners were the Ishibashi Memorial Hall, Tokyo, and the Edinburgh International Festival, perhaps suggesting a performance north of the border this summer. Pictorial imagery was explicitly evoked both in the composer’s programme note and in the music itself: ‘When writing this work I imagined sitting round a campfire as a child, watching the embers flaring off into the sky…’. Very different from Clarke’s æsthetic, one might say, or from Ferneyhough’s, and surely it is, yet perhaps accidentally, there seemed to be points of contact, not least in the use of repeated notes. The Webern-like shards – melodic shards, one might say – with which the piece opened soon gave way to ‘a lot [certainly true!] of rather wild percussive sounds (pizzicato, left hand pizzicato, col legno, spiccato, bouncing bow, finger tapping, snap pizzicato, pizzicato tremolo) and then combines with the imagined reverse sounds of those effects’. Left-hand pizzicati not only looked like but even sounded a little like the banjo, whilst it was intriguing to hear the ‘reverse sounds’, not least some rich-toned viola playing from Ralf Ehlers: a little neo-Romantic for some perhaps (the writing, that is), but the overall conception, arch-like in almost neo-Bartókian fashion, had its narrative and, I suspect, musical justification.

Finally came the first complete performance of Parades’s Canciones lunáticas, the second and third of the three songs having been first performed at the 2009 Heidelberg Spring International Music Festival. Jake Arditti, son of Irvine and of the composer, joined the players in what again was a magnificent performance. His is a countertenor voice of considerable richness; his rendition was spellbinding, attentive to words and music, for he and the quartet did not merely perform but interpreted. There is obvious scope for interpretation in this very different sound-world, more ‘atmospheric’ perhaps, certainly highly evocative of night, the moon, and madness. Opening with a dark, lonely night, the moon our only witness, we move through a second song of lunacy – wordplay apparent between ‘luna’ and ‘lunáticos’ – to a final dance for the liberated moon in the meadow. Pierrot lunaire inevitably came to mind, and the soloist’s whispering suggested a new version of the old idea of Sprechstimme. Here, focused upon the letter ‘s’, a link was perhaps also suggested with some of Nono’s vocal techniques, though that may simply just have been coincidence. If one could hardly but think of Pierrot, that was not the only Schoenbergian reference, or at least suggestion: Verklärte Nacht came to my mind more than once in the first song, the moon’s passing by and disquiet – ‘pasa la luna, inquieta’ – proving, not least in Jake Arditti’s delivery of the line, a turning point akin to that half-way through Schoenberg’s sextet: transfiguration perhaps? Some imagery was almost straightforwardly pictorial – harmonics and glissandi, for instance – but it always seemed to make musical as well as narrative sense, likewise the iridescence of ‘for the moonstruck’ (‘a los lunáticos’) in the second song. The final dance of the moon, ‘a slowed-down version,’ according to Paredes, ‘of the Mexican huapango, that changes from ternary to binary,’ was fantastical, quite enchanting.

Helmut Lachenmann Weekend, Southbank Centre, 23-24 October 2010

Queen Elizabeth Hall and Royal Festival Hall


String Quartet no.1, ‘Gran Torso’
String Quartet no.3, ‘Grido’

Arditti String Quartet: Irvine Arditti, Ashot Sarkissjan (violins), Ralf Ehlers (viola), Lucas Fels (cello)
____________________

Ein Kinderspiel
Pression
Toccatina
Got Lost

Helmut Lachenmann (piano)
Oliver Coates (cello)
Clio Gould (violin)
Sarah Leonard (soprano)
Rolf Hind (piano)
____________________


Film: …wo ich noch nie war (Bettina Ehrhardt)
____________________


Ausklang
Schreiben (United Kingdom premiere)

Rolf Hind (piano)
London Sinfonietta
Brad Lubman (conductor)


Not so much a review, as a few thoughts arising from the Southbank Centre’s Helmut Lachenmann Weekend. We should be grateful that it happened at all. Whilst given his due in certain parts of continental Europe – including residencies at the Salzburg and Lucerne Festivals, the latter featured in Bettina Ehrhardt’s film – Lachenmann has not been well served on this sceptred isle. I was staggered to discover in June that the LSO’s performance of Double (Grido) was the first British symphony orchestra performance of any of his works – and that only came about on account of Maurizio Pollini designing the programme. The London Sinfonietta has of course performed Lachenmann, and was here, in the final concert, considerably expanded to full symphonic size; but whether it be the fault of conductors, orchestras, or concert promoters, the record has been lamentable. Three cheers then to the Southbank Centre and to the performers involved.


First among equals here must be accounted the Arditti Quartet, whose performances of the first and third quartets – again featured, along with the second, in …wo ich noch nie war – must surely be accounted close to definitive. Lachenmann’s music requires excellent performance, it seems; indeed, he makes just that point in the film, not in an arrogant way, but almost by way of assimilation to the tradition of Mozart. Beethoven too looms large in so many of Lachenmann’s works – not in the sense of sounding ‘like’ him, though the example of the Grosse Fuge is far from irrelevant in that respect, but as a forerunner in terms of effort and moral countenance. One thing that emerged throughout the weekend, without ever being directly mentioned, was the crucial importance of Lachenmann’s German Protestant background. His father was a Lutheran pastor – not the only comparison one might make with Nietzsche – and Helmut is nothing if not a preacher. Indeed, it was intriguing to hear him speak of his teacher, Nono, visiting him in Germany, and, firebrand communist though he was, evincing respect for Lachenmann’s church, even attending divine service, intrigued by the prospect of silent prayer.

Silence is crucial to both composers – and to many others, of course. One of the most moving moments came with profound silence in the third quartet. Grido might be the Italian for ‘scream’, but that is not the only, nor even the most important, quality we hear. Extremes of quiet characterised the first too, audibly in Nono’s tradition. Here, it seemed to me, perhaps more than in the two large-scale orchestral pieces, however well performed by Rolf Hind and the Sinfonietta under Brad Lubman, spoke the true voice of the composer, with a purity that could hardly fail to put one in mind of Webern. It was, however, intriguing to hear both Schreiben and Ausklang in the light of Lachenmann’s avowed respect for Strauss, and his Alpine Symphony in particular (many thanks once again to the film). Not only did Strauss emerge as a precursor of Lachenmann’s musique concrète instrumentale – and he really is: just listen, not only to the wind machine! But Lachenmann’s use of the orchestra emerged as a virtuosic, though never merely virtuosic, playing upon an instrument, creating tone poems in a sense. I struggled somewhat with the form in these large-scale works: Ausklang is on a Brahmsian scale as a concerto. But they will doubtless repay further listening; one should not always expect to grasp a work immediately. There was certainly a sense of something very much worth attempting to grasp.

This issue of playing, indeed creating, an instrument comes to the very heart of Lachenmann. What emerged especially powerfully during the sequence from Ein Kinderspiel to Got Lost was his need to make each instrument his own, so that it was not, as it were, Beethoven’s, Brahms’s, or Schoenberg’s piano, but Lachenmann’s. ‘Extended techniques’ rather misleads, getting things the wrong way round. He seems to be doing something quite different from, say, Berio. For new techniques are created; Lachenmann plays the instrument with his music, rather than the other way round. And then, just as consonance – take the third quartet in particular – can reappear, ravishingly so, without the baggage of tonality as such, so can apparently ‘conventional’ writing, which is in fact anything but. Oliver Coates’s account of the solo cello work – Lachenmann tellingly describes it as ‘for cellist’ rather than for the instrument – was superlative in its technical and, yes, expressive, constructivism. Lachenmann spoke in one of the discussions of Bach: he was not trying to make one cry in ‘Erbarme dich,’ whose violin melody Lachenmann sang, but that was the result nevertheless. (Clearly, tonalities are of great importance to him, for he referred to Bach’s B minor rather than to the St Matthew Passion as such; likewise keys in Beethoven, Strauss, Mahler, and otherwise were explored in his verbal responses.) Lachenmann may not, then, have been trying to express, but that does not mean that he did not.

After the piece ‘for cellist’ the Toccatina for violin sounded almost like light music, but in a different context, with different ears, one might well have thought differently. Lachenmann’s rethinking and reconstruction of the voice came to the foreground in the excellent account from Sarah Leonard and Rolf Hind of Got Lost, its title taken from an English-language announcement in a Grunewald lift of lost laundry. Perhaps significantly, or perhaps not, Nietzsche’s Gay Science provides another of the texts. At any rate, this is use of words very much in a certain tradition of Nono – think of Il canto sospeso – albeit in a sterner, more Teutonic fashion. The preacher demands to be heard.

Nevertheless, it was the child’s play of the piano piece that perhaps made the most enduring impression of all. Doubtless the effect of Ein Kinderspiel was enhanced by having the composer himself as performer. But the distillation of Lachenmann principles – again creating the instrument, and, as it were, playing it on his music, rather than the other way round – in music that a child could and certainly should play, was not only instructive in itself. Lachenmann was also revealed as a true poet of the piano; more than once, Debussy sprang to mind as a possible inspiration. I for one was moved to wish to acquire the score to play for myself: a perfect counterpart to Children’s Corner or pieces from Mikrokosmos. Was that charm one discerned? Who would have thought it?

Edinburgh International Festival (4): Hannigan/Arditti Quartet - Beethoven, Dutilleux, Webern, and Schoenberg, 1 September 2009

Queen's Hall

Beethoven - String Quartet in B-flat major, op.133, 'Grosse Fuge'
Dutilleux - Ainsi la nuit
Webern - Six Bagatelles for String Quartet, op.9
Schoenberg String Quartet no.2

Barbara Hannigan (soprano)
Irvine Arditti and Ashot Sarkissjan (violins)
Ralf Ehlers (viola)
Lucas Fels (cello)

The second of the Arditti Quartet’s two Queen’s Hall series proved at least as successful as the first ; indeed, I thought the Beethoven performance, on this occasion the Grosse Fuge, surpassed that of the op.95 quartet the previous morning. It was interesting to note, in the light of my prior conversation with Irvine Arditti, the nature of the audience. He had spoken of the presence of Beethoven as a potential way to make an Arditti programme ‘a little more attractive for the non-contemporary music aficionado: people interested in hearing string quartets but who are not exactly contemporary music specialists’. This is doubtless impressionistic or downright prejudiced, but my impression of the audience was that this was in large part composed of those more likely to be interested in the chamber music repertoire. If so, such listeners could hardly have had a better opportunity to be introduced to two twentieth-century quartet masterpieces: Webern’s Bagatelles and Schoenberg’s second quartet. About Dutilleux’s Ainsi la nuit I felt more ambivalent but it certainly received every bit as fine a performance.

Arditti also spoke of his longstanding ‘desire to put the Grosse Fuge at the beginning of a programme and continue with contemporary music, rather as a statement to living composers, like: “This is what Beethoven did; now let’s see what you can do.”’ This was not quite the nature of the programme here, but Beethoven’s extraordinary work fulfilled a not entirely dissimilar function nevertheless; it certainly sounded here, as it should, at least as shockingly modern as anything that came thereafter. I heard an audience member during the interval lamenting that Beethoven had ‘sounded violent’; surely that is the point. From the opening, which was jagged, angular, and abrupt, such music alternated, albeit with a weighting towards the former, with a Beethoven who could be sweet, gentle, but never, repeat never, cloying. Sparks flew in what seemed almost a masterclass in the expression of Beethovenian struggle and defiance. Although the scale and nature of the forces are entirely different, I was more than once put in mind of the Missa Solemnis and, during the slow episode, the Adagio to the Ninth Symphony. The rhythmical and metrical complexity of Beethoven’s writing shone through, in a way that must have appealed to Conlon Nancarrow when he lauded this quartet’s performance of both the Grosse Fuge and his own third quartet (see the interview again). Tonality at times almost seemed to be beside the point, certainly not in the case of having ceased to function, but instead of having at times ceded its leading role to counterpoint.

Henri Dutilleux’s Ainsi la nuit seemed, as I said, to be performed extremely well; certainly the work’s structure was clearly delineated, as were its debts to Webern and to Bartókian night music. I also fancied that I heard a kinship – I suspect that rather than influence – to Messiaen. Prominent pizzicatos and playing sul ponticello added to the atmosphere. For whatever reason, however, I remained somewhat unreceptive, so shall move on to a very fine performance, following the interval, of Webern’s op.9 Bagatelles. Sighs, clarity, crystalline perfection, echoes (apparent or other) of the Grosse Fuge, great and minute dynamic contrasts: all of these were here. So was an aching, Schubertian beauty – how close Schubert so often stands to the Second Viennese School! – and a kinship of premonition to the Ligeti quartet heard in the previous concert, especially the sense of ethereal expiration. Above all, this Webern performance made one listen, reminding me once again why Nono so revered his predecessor.

This was the second time I had heard the Arditti Quartet perform both the Webern pieces and Schoenberg’s second quartet, the previous occasion having been a concert during the Southbank Centre’s Nono series. Claron McFadden was here replaced by the equally excellent Barbara Hannigan, whom I have previously encountered in a variety of challenging repertoire, including Nono and Berg. The density of Schoenberg’s counterpoint, so rich in expression, was conveyed from the opening of the first movement without fail. One could hear precisely what Schoenberg meant when writing, ‘In the first and second movements there are many sections in which the individual parts proceed regardless of whether or not their meeting results in codified harmonies.’ Programming and performance also revealed close parallels in this respect with the Grosse Fuge. Verklärte Nacht-like richness was revealed at times, yet sparingly, ensuring that appreciation of one’s harmonic bearings did not preclude following of neo-Brahmsian continuous motivic development. Harmonic nods to the First Chamber Symphony were unusually apparent in the scherzo. Still more prominent was a strong sense of how rhythmic and harmonic motion were as one. There was, moreover, a real charm to the celebrated quotation from ‘O du lieber Augustin,’ second violinist Ashot Sarkissjan and violist Ralf Ehrens providing just the right element of lilt and inflection, without resorting to all-too-audible inverted commas. This was poignant but clear-eyed, rather like the performance as a whole, a characteristic which in no sense precluded great intensity of musical expression – rather like Schoenberg’s œuvre as a whole.

There was a true sadness to the opening of Litanei, a passionate cello outburst from Lucas Fels preparing the way for the soprano entry: ‘Tief ist die trauer die mich umdüstert’ (‘Deep is the grief enveloping me’). Hanningan proved attentive as a Lieder-singer to the varying demands of Stefan George’s text and its implications: seductive and sultry, but also still and peaceful. The great final climax upon the word ‘liebe’ prepared the way for a peace of sorts, certainly a sense that everything had changed in the afterglow of the instrumental postlude. A very real sense of liberation could therefore characterise the instrumental opening of the final movement: hushed expectancy announcing the air of another planet. Entrückung, the movement’s title, was precisely what one felt: the ecstasy of transportation. The ‘soothing tremor of a sacred awe’ was followed by string-playing of an almost unbearable intensity, inevitably recalling Tristan und Isolde, as did the next stanza with its frankly Tristan-esque language, ‘atem wunschlos’ and all. When a ‘wild gust’ of wind gripped the verse, it felt musically as well as verbally inevitable, the product no doubt of so many years’ immersion in this endlessly fascinating score. The final stanza brought a sense of transfiguration: Wagnerian Verklärung. But there was also in the transfigured postlude ambiguity: where next? Schoenberg would soon embark upon his lonely, arduous, but necessary journey.