JACK Quartet: Lachenmann, 7 February 2026

Wigmore Hall

String Quartet no.3, ‘Grido’
Mes Adieux, for string trio
String Quartet no.1, ‘Gran Torso’
String Quartet no.2, ‘Reigen seliger Geister‘

Christopher Otto, Austin Wulliman (violins)

John Pickford Richards (viola)

Jay Campbell (cello)  

Now in his ninety-first year, Helmut Lachenmann continues to challenge, to confound, to nourish, and to delight. This concert brought home just how much his musique concrète instrumentale has become part of the compositional mainstream, as well as how, dare I suggest, a little of his mellowing and, more broadly, his increasing rapprochement with the tradition that has always preoccupied him. Lachenmann’s complete chamber music for strings was a generous offering indeed, though one at which we as listeners, let alone the players had certainly to work. Rewards were both instant and slow-burning; I find myself, two days later, still remarking on and developing musical thoughts and experiences. 

In that accomplishment, the dizzying excellence of the JACK Quartet played, if anything, a still greater part than would usually be the case in performance. These players, of course, never do things by halves. Here we not only had Lachenmann’s entire œuvre for string quartet in a single concert; we not only had it supplemented by the anything-but-slight, more recent (2021-2) Mes Adieux for string trio; this was also a single concert in a day of three, in which audiences – not I – had heard works by Catherine Lamb, Hans Abrahamsen, and Wolfgang Rihm. That would surely have made a difference to how one heard the final instalment: a climax, no doubt, if a daunting one. I wonder whether, though, it would have helped one listen one’s way in. Here, I did to an extent, through the canny placing of the third quartet, ‘Grido’, first. It is anything but easy listening, yet it afforded a more ‘approachable’ opening than chronological ordering would have given. 

From the outset, the JACK Quartet gave it with all the security, all the idiomatic command, one might expect from, say, the Takács Quartet in Haydn. Shards of or from German Romanticism were to be discerned even now, though not referentially. What struck me with some power was the total lack of distinction, whether in work or performance, between what once might have been thought ‘extended’ techniques and others: this was, as it were, the resolved palette of the string quartet. Full of melody, breath, emotion, it sounded from the dawn of the twenty-first century as if Schumann had continued to compose, heavily influenced but still more greatly liberated by post-Nono stillness and tranquillity. Relationships between instruments were part of the game, almost as if in Bartók. As music, entirely acoustic, ricocheted around the stage, sure in the knowledge that electronics were not required, it was full of surprises, old and new, not least in its continued ability to sing. In microtonal unison-ish and other interval-ish passages, music swarmed in finely judged redramatisation of an age-old dialectic between freedom and, if not, quite determinism, then unfreedom. Pitches emerged in an almost spectralist – though spectralist it certainly was not – clarity. In this fantastical world, the ever-becoming quality of Romanticism sounded reborn. 

Violin, viola, and cello returned to the stage for Mes Adieux. Ironically, its texture sounded thicker at the start and indeed much for what was to come, Lachenmann often keener to employ all voices here at once. Was it more ‘thematic’, to employ a term one might have thought by now had lost all sense, yet did not seem to have? Or was my listening, following so powerful an introduction? I am not entirely clear, but one way or another, that seemed a meaningful way in and around this particular matrix. It was no less magical, absorbing, intense, or inventive. Again like Nono and Webern – or, for that matter, Bruckner – there was so music in the silences, let alone the near-silences, one could have listened to them all night.   

In retrospect, the First String Quartet marked a watershed in string quartet writing and performance. Its construction from sounds hitherto unknown in the genre is remarkable in itself, but so is its legacy for what might be expected, relished, and developed by instruments and ensembles. ‘What I want,’ Lachenmann wrote in 1971, the year in which he began its composition, ‘is always the same.’ And hearing these works together, whatever their difficulties, made that clear: ‘art as a foretaste of freedom in an age without freedom’. In the cracks and crevasses between, say, pitch and non-pitch, sound and silence, and in their conversion into the age-old quartet-quality of conversation lay a sometimes difficult, but intensely rewarding ride. Deconstruction and reconstruction of instruments and their sound came more to the fore, but there was a moving aesthetic of care, as well as carefulness, that belied reputation of mere radicalism. 

Orpheus reconfigured himself, so as to sing and dance, if not quite how we knew it, in the Second Quartet’s ‘dance of the blessed spirits’. Here, it sounded and moved as a response, a revisiting, a further journeying beyond Lachenmann’s explorations in the Second. Both possessed passages of a rare, febrile beauty, so long as one listened, yet also a sense of quite how much was at stake in such play(ing). Spirit shadows cast by flautato strings and the penetrating, uncompromising musical intelligence behind them; transformations both gentle and violent; an infinite number, or so it seemed, of shadings in multiple musical parameters: Lachenmann continued in these and in an undeniable, if flickering sense of something numinous, even noumenal, to challenge, to confound, to nourish, and to delight.

JACK Quartet - Carter, Aguilar, Lachenmann, Boulez, Houben, Webern, Cage, Wulliman, and Cheung, 22 March 2025

Wigmore Hall

Carter: String Quartet no.5
Eduardo Aguilar: HYPER
Lachenmann: String Quartet no.3, ‘Grido’

Boulez: Livre pour quatuor: 1b
Eva-Maria Houben: Nothing More
Boulez: Livre pour quatuor: 3c
Webern: Six Bagatelles, op.9
Cage: String Quartet in Four Parts
Boulez: Livre pour quatuor: 1a
Austin Wulliman: Escape Rites
Anthony Cheung: Twice Removed
Boulez: Livre pour quatuor: 2

Christopher Otto, Austin Wulliman (violins)

John Pickford Richards (viola)

Jay Campbell (cello)

From a full day – three concerts – of twentieth- and twenty-first-century music for string quartet, I was able to attend the last two of the JACK Quartet’s Wigmore Hall appearances. Alas, I had to miss most of two pieces in the third, both from 2024, by Austin Wulliman and Anthony Cheung. It would be unfair to comment further, other than to say I should be keen to put that right, should the opportunity present itself. Otherwise, the JACK Quartet showed itself once again to be an outstanding ensemble of broad musical sympathies, encompassing works at what we might consider the modernist end of the spectrum, but also others, which have points of contact with the likes of Boulez and Lachenmann, as well as Cage, yet also have quite different concerns. 

Carter’s Fifth (and final) Quartet opened proceedings for me, as finely crafted in the JACK’s performance as this masterpiece is on the page. From the outset, one was left in no doubt that every note counted. Patterns, progressions, and contours in sound were communicated as readily as in an outstanding performance of a Haydn quartet. One felt as well as heard – as throughout the day – emotional breadth and depth, as well as energy, rhetorical eloquence, and intellect. Carter’s metric modulation provided the turning points, the moments of decision, in transitional material. His indications underlay not only tempi in the narrower sense, but in a fuller understanding of character: for instance, ‘Lento espressivo’, ‘Presto scorrevole’ (the latter word a favourite of Carter’s), or ‘Adagio sereno’. In high-lying violin harmonics, in a magical reinvention of viola pizzicato, in a conversation between two or three of the instruments (and players), or in the four coming together in time-honoured fusion of harmony, counterpoint, rhythm, and attack, this was the keenest, most captivating of quartet music. 

Eduardo Aguilar’s ten-minute HYPER (2021) followed, beginning almost inaudible on the first violin, yet fast becoming not only audible, but vividly present across the quartet, pitch gradually discernible in the gathering of a whirlwind. Then came another—in another direction. (I was going to say the opposite direction, but that would, I think, present a false binary.) Tempi shifted and transformed, not ‘like’ Carter, but holding a potential point in common. So did other parameters and other, less definable concerns: intriguingly including a sense of ease or effort, speaking perhaps to some, indefinable sense of subjectivity and/or objectivity. At the close, the players gave up their instruments, though continued to play with their bows, two walking into the audience and making music with and into the air. 

Lachenmann’s ‘Grido’ Quartet immediately showed the players once more fully inside the idiom: language, yes, but also a broader sensibility and strategy. There was at the opening something of a ‘story so far’ impression: both to Lachenmann’s previous quartet writing and even to the history of the genre more broadly. It invited and, if one accepted, compelled us to listen in a performance with a strong sense of discovery. Dynamic and other fluctuations – pitch, for instance, through what one might have thought vibrato, yet only rarely was – grabbed and led us on our journey as much as more overt musical gesture, in a neat-half-hour of enormous intensity of musical expression. This was, without question, a German heart and mind at work: ever-becoming, on multiple levels. At the close, one felt, as one might with Webern or Nono, that one was hearing differently, more clearly. 

In the second concert, movements from Boulez’s Livre pour quatuor framed a wider exploration, involving not only those works I was unable to hear but also Eva-Maria Houben, Webern, and Cage. Webern stood behind the other three: ironically, perhaps, for one the brevity of whose music is so celebrated (if never really the point). Here, his op.9 Six Bagatelles sounded, far from inappropriately, as much as backward glance to German Romanticism as Boulez’s ‘threshold’ for modernity. Each of his six movements said everything, and yet each said something different. This was not compression, but rather a paradoxical (or dialectical) superfluity in which not a note, not a sigh, not a Viennese dance inflection, was anything but necessary. Mahler sounded more present than ever. 

Houben’s Nothing More (2019) took what one might, in the broad rather than the US American sense, call a minimalist route from Webern (from Cage too, I think). There was nowhere to hide, not that anyone should have wished to. Precision was all in work and performance. Much playing was, if not at the limits of audibility, not so far away from them. This, one felt, not entirely unlike Lachenmann, was a way into listening ‘itself’. 

The glassy non-vibrato of Cage’s 1949-50 Quartet suggested, similarly, both a fiddling and a viol consort past, complemented by the music’s melodies and harmony. (It was a little surprising to find myself thinking of harmony in Cage, but that doubtless points to my preconceptions, not to his reality.) The apparent simplicity of its four movements is real enough, but again seems as much an invitation to listen and to listen differently, as a quality in itself. Its related chastity – rarely, if ever, does Cage (for me) sound erotic – sounded, like that of the Five Melodies I heard earlier this month, closer than one might expect to the folksiness of ‘populist’ Copland. In both cases, though, that probably conceals more than it reveals. The closing Quodlibet came as relief in every sense.   

Boulez’s more-or-less contemporary Livre pour quatuor (1948-9), long more or less unheard, seems to be regaining popularity again. It seemed to me a pity not to hear all of it, with or without the reconstructed completion of the fourth movement, but a fragmentary approach has always been part of its performance tradition—and some would say also speaks in some way to essence. Hearing parts of it interspersed with other music heightened its contrasting qualities and perhaps aided reflection on its particularities within Boulez’s œuvre too. At the outset, it may have been the relative austerity – classicism perhaps, though that raises at least as many questions as it answers – that spoke, especially if one had in mind from preceding works the explosive qualities of the Second Piano Sonata, or indeed the eroticism of Les Soleil des Eaux. And yet, even in movement 1b, a veiled sense of kinship with late Beethoven as allegedly annihilated in the Sonata came through in (smaller) fragmentary manifestation of its dialectical contrasts. 3c brought greater emotional, Webernesque intensity, aptly preceding the Bagatelles, whilst 1a at the beginning of the second half sounded more variegated, partly in reaction to the different, arguably more essential austerity of the Cage. The second movement, with which the concert closed, engaged itself – and us – in a process of seemingly infinite, centrifugal transformation, perhaps not only a quartet but a world in itself.

Southbank Centre - Xenakis at 100, 8 October 2022

Queen Elizabeth Hall

O-Mega; Palimpsest; Echange; Thalleïn for ensemble

Concret PH; Kottos; Rebonds A, Rebonds B

Psappha; Ikhoor; Tetras; Mikka and Mikka ‘S’; Pléïades

Mark van de Wiel (clarinet)

Philip Howard (piano)

Tim Gill (cello)

Oliver Lowe, Colin Currie (percussion)

London Sinfonietta

Geoffrey Paterson (conductor)

JACK Quartet

Colin Currie Group

Iannis Xenakis’s music does not age. It is an ahistorical cliché to say so, likewise to say how stark, elemental, uncompromising, visceral, mysterious, unique, and so on it is. Those descriptions retain their force, whilst remaining open to exception and to broader questioning. But they came to many listeners’ mind, judging by the general conversation at the Queen Elizabeth Hall throughout this Xenakis Day, seeming to lodge themselves in a sort of collective consciousness through which works and performances could be heard. I did not, alas, hear all of the day’s events, but I attended the two principal concerts in the hall itself, hearing also three of the works on offer in the foyer in between. It was, I think, enough—although the way the closing Pléïades left one aurally bludgeoned was less on account of the astounding performances from the Colin Corrie Group of six percussionists than the unsuitability of the hall: a pity, one necessarily felt, whilst recognising that the Southbank Centre had done what it could.

The first works I heard were four from the London Sinfonietta and Geoffrey Paterson, in performances like everything here that seemed quite beyond reproach. (If you are going to play Xenakis, you tend to do it well.) O-Mega, for percussion and ensemble, made for a splendid opener; after that, his final work, we could only go back, at least temporally. Oliver Lowe’s opening bongo tattoo, a call to something, it seemed, met with implacable wind response, a hieratic ritual initiated in a theatre of music that might always have been, except it had not. Moving from 1997 to 1979, Palimpsest, for eleven instruments, offered piano (and other) scales reinvented before our ears, its lines unmistakeably architectural, even engineered—to borrow a little too readily from the composer’s other callings. Sawmill strings, wind fractals in which one could see as well as hear the geometry, virtuoso drumming and so much more: this was not easy listening, nor was it supposed to be. It was quite a journey to final, mesmerising piano-and-drum-led climax.

Échange, for bass clarinet (Mark van de Wiel) and ensemble, was similarly yet entirely differently primal. Again, it sounded unmistakeably that ‘this was how it must be’, in a world of violence (like our own) quite unconcealed. How can we continue so blithely, it seemed to ask, in a world imperilled by nuclear attack? Xenakis must have asked the same thing, or so we fancied. And yet, life in all its physicality, all its mental wonder, continued. The bass clarinet, somewhere between priest and Pierrot, bade new sounds emerge at will, though that will was again sometimes no mean effort. The ensemble could, though, and did respond. The startling weirdness of an E-flat major chord could hardly have sounded more alien: a signal, it seemed, from yet another planet.

Thalleïn, the Sinfonietta’s first commission (1984) from Xenakis, was as implacable as anything yet heard, perhaps still more so. Siren-like—ambulance, not temptress—its opening had us browbeaten, and thereby strangely receptive to proliferating subtleties to come, even to the point of finding them inviting. Masses of sound continued to confront us to exhilarating effect. Ascending and descending scales led both ways, so it seemed, to hell, their mockery a deeply serious business. Piccolo pierced our consciousness, at times painfully, like a moment of alarm on an intensive care unit screen. There was blood-letting aplenty, the final string swarms, punctuated by percussion, as far as ever from consolation. 

Concret PH, like most, possibly all, musique concrete actually did seem to have aged—though even that is dependent on our knowing the unknowable Rankean ‘how it really was’, and how can we? Even if we had been there, in the 1958 Expo Philips Pavilion Xenakis as Le Corbusier’s assistant designed, memory would play its tricks. There is no ‘authenticity’; there never was; and anyone who tells you otherwise is a fool or a charlatan. How admirably full of integrity Xenakis and his fellow avant-gardists seem contrasted with those snake-oil-salesmen to come. No, you cannot hear the St Matthew Passion as if you had never heard Xenakis; more to the point, why would you wish to? Or is that just to invest my own fantasy of postwar ‘inauthenticity’ as super- or supra-authenticity? There was, at any rate, room for fantasy here, if one closed one’s eyes and listened. Here was another world: inaccessible, perhaps, like that of Bach’s Leipzig, yet an idea not without its own seduction. 

Tim Gill’s performance of Kottos for cello really deserved the main hall, as did Lowe’s Rebonds A and Rebonds B. They were mightily fine accounts, though, wherever one heard them, the first’s evocation of the horrible hundred-armed creature, progeny of Uranus and Gaia, a song both fragile and stark: deeply rooted, if hardly in the conventional harmonic sense. Or perhaps it was, for I felt the implication at least of a harmonic language, even if I could never know it, even if it were in fact unknowable. There was whimsy in the asides, even as the ‘creature’ gained strength. And the music reached something akin to ecstasy, doubtless more effortful than that of Messiaen, yet no less genuine for that. The state of frenzy reached was a liberation of sorts, not least amidst the hell of our current existence. Both Rebonds pieces, A in particular, invoked—even if we knew not what (that inscrutability again). One was drawn in, less hypnotised than converted, in powerfully cumulative, remarkably different experiences of control and abandon. 

In the evening, Colin Currie’s Psappha seemed almost designed to cement our growing sense of structure as fundamental in an emphatic, again quasi-engineered sense to Xenakis’s work. The extraordinary musicianship on show never threatened to take on a life of its own; structure remained paramount. There seemed no other way. And the silences: they might almost have been from Bruckner. Here, again, was a summoning both archaic and not. Pléïades, here ordered ‘Metaux’, ‘Claviers’, ‘Peaux’, ‘Mélanges’, suffered, as I said, from an ear-splitting quality that made it, for me at least, too difficult to take, the sixxens too rarely emerging, to quote Xenakis, as ‘clouds, nebulas, and galaxies of the fragmented dust of beats’. Even here, though, ‘the idea of periodicity, repetition, duplication, faithful, pseudo-faithful,’ and above all ‘unfaithful copy’ shone through. ‘Claviers’ came closer to polyphony, its ripples even a little Boulezian, though I am not sure either composer would have approved of the comparison. Its patterns emerged as if on multiple screens before our ears. Drummed hypnosis in ‘Peaux’ prepared the way for less a synthesis or recapitulation than a gigantic rehearing, even rewriting when all instruments united in ‘Mélanges’. It was ear-splitting, again, at times, but in quite an aural landscape, at times almost dreamed.

Rhythm, its problems and opportunities, had haunted much of the string music in between, especially Ikhoor for string trio and Tetras for string quartet, both given by the JACK Quartet. Vivid, fiercely directed narratives marked out both, as did superhuman unanimity of purpose. Tetras seemed somehow both stranger and familiar, the strangeness heightened by sounds I might have sworn had emerged from electronics, did I not know otherwise. Voices, of whatever sort, bore witness, as if from Luigi Nono’s long-estranged cousin. Two works for violin solo, Mikka and Mikka ‘S’, were given by the quartet member absent for the trio, Austin Wulliman. Measured swarming, control in dilemma, line tracked as if in a real-time graph: throughout one ‘felt’ the mathematics, or imagined one did. As in every performance here, there was a rightness that left one knowing, like this music or not, it deserved as well as demanded to be heard.

Musikfest Berlin (9) – JACK Quartet/Junge Deutsche Philharmonie/Nott: Lachenmann and Strauss, 15 September 2019

Philharmonie

Lachenmann: Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied

Strauss: Ein Heldenleben

Christopher Otto, Austin Wulliman (violins)

John Pickford Richards (viola)

Jay Campbell (cello)

Junge Deutsche Philharmonie

Jonathan Nott (conductor)

It is extraordinary to think that Helmut Lachenmann’s Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied, written in 1979 and 1980, is now almost forty years old; or perhaps, on reflection, it is not. When one considers how much Lachenmann, still considered dangerously outré by many fifteen or twenty years ago, is now not only accepted but welcomed and even loved as a grand old man of German music, and indeed the world’s, it makes a good deal of sense. (It happens to them all.) The play between familiar material – a brief spoken and musical introduction involving the composer will have rendered it so to all – and what we, in the midst of its disintegration and reintegreation, might consider its pasts and futures is not, Lachenmann advised, comical (komisch) but rather cheerful (heiter). The distinction can be a fine one, most likely lost in my attempt at translation. It was not, however, lost in this excellent performance from the JACK Quartet, the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, and Jonathan Nott. Nor was Lachenmann’s opening, Stravinskian acknowledgement: ‘Wir Komponisten sind Parasiten’ (‘We composers are parasites’), referring not only to his use of Deutschlandlieder (Haydn, Bach, and others) but his remodelling of Morton Feldman’s The Viola in My Life into a version of his own ‘the music in my [German, bourgeois] life’. Indeed, he proceeded to acknowledge the Christmas Oratorio’s ‘Pastoral Symphony’ as a song not only of his Existenz but his Heimat. (Think Edgar Reitz and Hermann Simon, if you will…)

A classic, then, of musique concrète instrumentale and of German music’s self-reckoning received a performance worthy of such classical status, without losing any of its immediacy and excitement. The quartet’s opening play with material from Haydn’s imperial hymn left open the question of deconstruction or reconstruction: why not have both, and more? It also, crucially, bade us listen intently, as if pre-empting the late music of Lachenmann’s teacher, Luigi Nono. So too did the full orchestra, when employed, its make-up at any one time constantly changing, yet never quite rejection the concerto grosso-ish line-up. Webern’s example was surely heard in the expert (both in work and performance) passing of lines between instruments, although the outcome rightly felt very different. Metrical transformations and restatements proved just as important as those of melody or harmony; this is, after all, a dance suite. Indeed, one had the impression almost of melodic lines rushing to grasp hold of metres, being carried forward upon them, transformed and yet also restated by them. When music from the gigues of two Bach French Suites is given the Lachenmann treatment, is it the gigue (an acknowledged dance in the ninth of the work’s seventeenth parts) or Bach’s notes that will endure? Does that question even make any sense? Even if it does, should one be asking it at that time? It was quite a ride, both immediate and mediated.

Lachenmann’s enthusiasm for Strauss’s Alpine Symphony is well known. I do not know what he thinks of Ein Heldenleben, but it made for a fascinating companion-piece: a self-reckoning of its own, of course, often bizarrely misunderstood as mere egotism. Nott seemed especially keen to emphasis the piece’s symphonic qualities, the opening section ‘Der Held’, perhaps slightly slower, even sturdier, than often one hears, insistent in its grounding of the E-flat major to which it will, to which it must, return. Like Lachenmann in its way, it bade me listen. Not that there was any want of colour from the excellent young players, but this was clearly not intended as an orchestral showpiece. The opening of ‘Des Helden Widersacher’ was in turn quicker than is typically heard, affording greater contrast that yet had clearly evolved, even if one could not quite say how, from preceding material.  ‘Wir Komponisten sind Parasiten’; wir Kritiker auch… An organised chaos of carping woodwind melodies seemed almost to prefigure the birdsong of Messiaen, albeit with considerably more negative intent. Throughout these and other contrasts, Nott ensured continuity of line and sound, which is not to say unexciting, communication of fundamental harmonic rhythm, which far too often can be lost in performances of this music.

The concertmaster’s solo in ‘Des Helden Gefährtin’ showed both dramatic flair and eminently musical phrasing: in a sense, emblematic of the performance as a whole. So too was the depth of orchestral string tone, which yet never overwhelmed nor came close to doing so. That was not the point – and the musicians, Nott certainly included, knew it. For there was similar depth to his conception of the piece overall: not necessarily without irony, but understanding that irony will better be expressed through underlying seriousness of purpose. The closing sections brought both a symphonic sense of arrival and, very much in Beethoven’s Eroica footsteps, further development. Indeed, Strauss’s invention here registered with uncommon skill; too often, this music finds itself unwittingly belittled as mere winding down or tailpiece. A dignified, close, nothing exaggerated, furthered poignancy that arose from the notes and the connections between them, affording apt comparison and contrast with the thinking, writing, and performance of Lachenmann.

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.