'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.
 

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.