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.

Musikfest Berlin (4) – Ensemble Musikfabrik: Lachenmann, Hosokawa, and Eötvös, 8 September 2019

Kammermusiksaal

Helmut Lachenmann: Marche fatale (2016-17); Berliner Kirschblüten (2016-17)

Toshio Hosokawa: Birds Fragments II (1989)

Peter Eötvös: Secret Kiss (2018, German premiere)

Hosokowa: Birds Fragments III (1955)

Eötvös: Sonata per sei (2006, German premiere)

Ryoko Aoki (Noh-performer)

Mayumi Miyata (shō)

Ulrich Löffler (piano)

Helen Bledsoe (flute)

Dirk Rothbrust (percussion)

Ensemble Musikfabrik

Peter Eötvös (conductor)

Images: © Adam Janisch 

The metaphor of the journey has been so overworked, so debased, that it will often now elicit little more than a groan. Perhaps, though, there was something to be retained, lightly, even playfully, from the idea of composers and their music – and its performance – travelling in different directions here, in a splendid concert from Cologne’s Ensemble Musikfabrik.

Helmut Lachenmann might seem initially here to have travelled quite some distance indeed from the composer we know and, in many cases, love. However, as Schoenberg once remarked, ‘a Chinese poet is certainly not only someone who sounds Chinese. Rather, he says something else as well!’ Lachenmann’s Marche fatale acquired a cult following – I account myself a member – last year, when, in its new orchestral version, it heralded Stuttgart’s New Year. It was originally composed for piano, though, which is how we heard it on this occasion, from Ensemble Musikfabrik’s Ulrich Löffler. That in itself made me listen, re-listen, to material with which I had perhaps become over-familiar. (Is that not what Lachenmann bids us do all the time with the debris of German Romanticism?) Oddly, and perhaps only because I knew the orchestral version first, the piano piece sounded more akin to a piano reduction: again, an interesting challenge for my ears. But then, I started to wonder: was not the grit in the oyster here clearer; were not the dissonances harsher; was the music not more evidently fractured? Was this not, in a strong sense, the ‘original’, and what did that mean? Subversion of Liszt’s most celebrated Liebestraum seemed more pronounced. The close certainly had more of the abyss to it. And if I had my doubts about Löffler’s rubato at times, it made me listen – and rendered those fractures more pronounced. Again, surely the point.

Berliner Kirschblüten came as all the more of a surprise, since I neither knew it nor its antecedents (for instance, the 2000 Sakura-Variations on a Japanese folk song, and its 2008 expansion, Sakura mit Berliner Luft). An opening that can sound sentimental immediately has one question one’s own orientalism. Is there anything one can do about it? Perhaps not, but at least it alerted me to the problem in time for the works by Toshio Hosokawa. Then the song from Paul Lincke’s operetta, whose jazzy deconstruction was more than welcome. As with Marche fatale, this was unmistakeably Lachenmann’s mind at work. He was taking a walk on another side, perhaps, but was that not all the more Adornian? Yes, most likely, but it was enjoyable too. Here, the cavernous abyss at the close drew comparison with that of Marche fatale, but was longer and, most likely, deeper, resonance and dissolution two sides of the same coin.

Next came the second of Hosokawa’s Birds Fragments, for shō – used, most likely not coincidentally, in Lachenmann’s Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern – and percussion. An opening invocation, with strokes on bass drum and piercing cries from crotale, provided in its continuation ritualistic (I think, but am I orientalising?) backdrop for sh­ō chords that drew one in, had one listen to every pitch, to the movement of lines: not entirely unlike Marche fatale, in fact. Its form and duration seemed to me perfectly judged; nor could there be any doubting the distinction of performances from Mayumi Miyata and Dirk Rothbrust. After the interval, in the third, for shō and flute (Helen Bledsoe), the same could certainly be said of performances and form. The flute part, first alto flute, then piccolo, sounded here more akin to commentary upon shō processional, that commentary then susceptible to transformative influence; or so it seemed in terms of a drama that perhaps approached our notions of music-theatre.

Music-theatre in a more emphatic sense had been heard in between, in Peter Eötvös’s Secret Kiss, for reciter (the splendid Ryoko Aoki) and ensemble, here receiving its German premiere. An opening percussion invocation forged a connection with Hosokawa – as well as readying the audience for the world of Noh. Aoki’s recitation of the text (from Alessandro Baricco’s novel, Seta, in Oriza Hirata’s Japanese translation) moved between speech and song, the ensemble (flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and percussion) inviting further, more or less inevitable, comparison with Pierrot lunaire. And indeed, it was just as much in the instrumental lines that narrative weight and content seemed to lie, all exquisitely crafted yet dramatically involving. Ominous, unsettling, beguiling, radiant: this distilled tale of a nineteenth-century Frenchman travelling to Japan to learn secrets of silk manufacture, of subsequent orientalist enchantment, and of something we might call death, duly enchanted and, moreover, duly invited us to question its and our journey.

The programme closed with Eötvös’s Sonata per sei, only now, thirteen years late, receiving its German premiere, again conducted by the composer. Written for two pianos, three percussionists, and sampler keyboard, it inevitably invites comparison with Bartók’s Sonata for two pianos and percussion, as well, perhaps, as with the wondrous spatial acrostics of Boulez’s sur Incises. Bartók certainly seemed to be echoes in the entry of the first percussionist, as well as in the pianists’ first entry. That did not, however, ultimately seem to be the point, the sampler reminding us that, certain formal correspondences notwithstanding – was that at some point a Bartók-like arch? – Eötvös’s procedures were quite different. Groups – that is, the keyboard players and percussionists – sometimes functioned more or less as one, sometimes very much as individuals. Overall form strongly echoed, without quite replicating, movements of a classical sonata and their ‘character’. As with the rest of the programme, I was left wanting more: a sign, then, of a journey well travelled.

'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.