McCabe: String Quartet nr. 5

Lately I have been taking the opportunity to get acquainted with some exotic repertoire via Hyperion Records' 'Please, someone, buy me ...' offer. These are CDs that have not been sold by Hyperion for a very long time and that can be purchased straight from their website at deep discount prices. I've been lucky, for example, with the complete Rachmaninov piano works by Howard Shelley. Another lucky find was a CD with three quartets by the British composer John McCabe. I must say the name rang only the dimmest of bells. Apparently McCabe has made a parallel career as a teacher and pianist. Already in 1972 he recorded all the Haydn sonatas for Decca (but he was not first to do so; Rudolf Buchbinder prededed him).

His compositional oeuvre is substantial: five symphonies, lots of concertos, a ballet, and many works for solo instruments and chamber ensembles, five string quartets amongst them. I've listened to the Fifth Quartet, of 1989. I must say it is a delectable score that speaks of a very subtle musical imagination and solid craftsmanship. There is a somewhat programmatic background to the score in that it was prompted by a series of aquatints entitled The Bees by Graham Sutherland. There are 14 sections in the quartet and they all correspond to one of Sutherland's graphic works: it starts with a 'Metamorphosis', then goes on to 'Hatching 1', to 'Hatching 2', 'Nuptial Flight', 'The Court' and so on.

It's always difficult to get a narrative backbone out of one's mind once it's there, but after four or five auditions I could make more or less abstraction of the story. Although the music is not difficult, repeated listening is necessary to appreciate its quiet delicacy and architectural beauty. The idiom is mildly modernistic, reminding me, in its harmonic inventiveness and occasional tendency to emulate an hieratic old style (the Germans have a word for this: 'antikisieren'), of Frank Martin. There is a sporadic (and almost tongue-in-cheek) reference to Debussy. But a more persistent influence might be Carl Nielsen. It seems to me that the start of the quartet, a mysterious descending two note motif, can be heard as a little homage to the Danish master who used as the very opening of his Helios Ouverture. Here, in this BBC interview, McCabe confirms his admiration for Nielsen.

Guy Rickards, in the excellent CD booklet, describes the 21-minute work as consisting of three parts: a slow introduction, consisting of the sections mentioned above; then a scherzo middle part and an energetic finale. However, for me it works better to think of it as consisting of two parts only: a slow introduction and then a predominantly fast torso of rondo character. Two things strike: McCabe's considerable inventiveness when it comes to extracting musical colour from merely sixteen strings, and the feeling of solid structural workmanship. Colour suggests the exoticism of the insect world whilst the deeper musical logic mirrors its intelligence.

The Vanbrugh Quartet (an Irish ensemble) offer a superb performance, propelled forward by a seemingly effortless skill and pervaded by a dignified calm which in in odd consonance with the music. The Hyperion recording (with Tony Faulkner behind the console) is almost ideal too: it has just the right blend of body and sense of space. All in all another wonderful discovery in this random walk through the quartet repertoire ...

Comment: Review of 'The People's Artist - Prokofiev's Soviet Years'

I posted a review of Simon Morrison's 'The People's Artist - Prokofiev's Soviet Years'  here. It's a welcome addition to the library but not the final word on this (altogether tragic) episode in his life. Morrison is very much focused on Prokofiev's dramatic output. The instrumental and symphonic work gets a perfunctory treatment. And the foundational mystery - namely how Prokofiev was able to find artistic nourishment in this brutally inhuman society - remains a riddle.

Xenakis: String Quartets nr. 1-4

Xenakis wrote four string quartets, spanning a period of 40 years. His first, ST/4, was 'written' (rather: programmed) between 1955 and 1962. It's a strictly algorithmic composition (11 minutes) where "each detail of each sound of intervention type of timbre (arco, pizzicato, glissando, ...), choice of instrument, pitch, inclination of glissando, duration, dynamics, etc." is determined by a computer. It sounds less intimidating than one might expect. The result is a typically nervous, pointillistic avant garde idiom.

The Second Quartet, Tetras, dates from 1983. This is classic Xenakis stuff: abrasive and volcanic, and yet suffused with a mellow sense of mastery and wisdom. Taking just under 15 minutes, it's a more substantial work compared to ST/4 too. It is laid out in nine sections, played without interruption but nevertheless fairly easy to demarcate. There is profusion of expressive devices and sound effects and the piece must be extremely demanding on the players. Sometimes it sounds really funny too. But on the whole one cannot remain indifferent to this very powerful music. It really demands awed attention. If there's anything in this genre that I have heard up to now that could be considered to go beyond what Bartok did in his Fourth Quartet in 1928, then it's this.

Tetora also means 'four' but then in the ancient Doric language. This Third Quartet (1990, roughly 14 minutes) already belongs to Xenakis' late period in which his musical language densifies and become monumental, and texturally almost impenetrable. The work starts with a brutish, primitive modal melody which indeed recalls a kind of proto-folk inspiration from the depths of time. The musical material seem to be blocks, hewn out of some harsh mineral material. There is not a single pizzicato to lighten up the texture. The language is less obviously avant garde, but the overall effect is more alienating than either Tetras or ST/4. Not an easy listen.

The final quartet, Ergma, is not on my collection of chamber music (a double CD on Montaigne Audivis, with the Arditti Quartet taking the quartets splendidly in their stride). However, it can be heard via Youtube in a performance by the American JACK Quartet. It's a slightly shorter work (9 minutes) composed in 1994. It seems to continue the line set out with Tetora: a thick and opaque soundscape, just a tad more strident and dissonant than his predecessor. As one of the Youtube listener remarks: "I know Xenakis is not for everyone, but these harmonies are pretty kickass." The work was commissioned by the Mondriaan Quartet and allegedly is an homage to the Dutch painter. It even doesn't sound implausible.

I quite enjoyed getting to know these works better. Tetras is the big prize here and I will certainly return to this work. The late pieces are ok, but not for everyday listening ...

Schnittke - String Quartet nr. 3

I revisited Schnittke's Third Quartet in the interpretation by the Borodin Quartet. It's a Virgin CD that has long been deleted from the catalogue. I didn't take me a long time to appreciate that the Kronos Quartet's reading is vastly superior. Take just the work's two opening minutes where Schnittke introduces this polystylistic jumble of themes. The CD booklet identifies them now as a Lassus quotation, the main theme of Beethoven's Grosse Fugue en Shostakovich's personal musical monogram DSCH (transposed these four notes also happen to be the first four notes of Beethoven's fugal subject). The Borodin present an almost romantic travesty of the introductory Lassus, with buckets full of rubato and dramatic pauses, whilst in the Kronos version it sounds as I think a quartet transcription of a polyphonic piece ought to sound: eerily neutral, disembodied almost. It immediately transports us to another, ghostly world which I associate very much with Schnittke. Then, the Kronos offer a superb rendition of what sounds to me like a folksong (or perhaps a revolutionary song; I can't hear Beethoven's fugue or Shostakovich's monogram in this; it's from 1:43 onwards in the Kronos recording): it's strangely morose and uplifting at the same time. The Kronos' strings evoke the sound of a primitive fiddle and bagpipe ensemble. It speaks of destitution but also of belief and quiet determination. There is a freshness that evokes the wide open expanses of the motherland. With the Borodin we hear nothing of that at all. It just sounds as if they are out of sync. It's a jumble that gets rather on my nerves. With that very unpromising start I lost most of my appetite for this recording. It's not a catastrophe front to back, however. The Agitato is even quite good, but doesn't surpass the Kronos. Interestingly, the Borodin observe a repeat of the central section, lengthening the movement with a full three minutes. But also in the finale there is this latent tearfulness which I find to be squarely out of place. So after careful listening (I put the two versions side by side in Garageband) it's quite clear that the Borodin are no match at all for the Kronos.

Incidentally, in the Cambridge Companion to the String Quartet, Tully Potter is rather disparaging about the Borodin Quartet:

The violist Rudolf Barshai was involved in two noted ensembles, the second being the Tchaikovsky Quartet, whose career was ended by the untimely death of its leader Yulian Sitkovetsky. The first, which became known as the Borodin Quartet after Barshai's departure, has now been going for more than half a century and includes no founder member, although the cellist Valentin Berlinsky has been aboard since its early days. He is perhaps responsible for the way this quartet - which admittedly plays to a superlative standard - hands its interpretation down from generation to generation like holy writ. Much of its music-making is mannered and unspontaneous, with its trademark senza vibrato overused. Capable of memorable performances on a good day, the Borodin Quartet is far from deserving the status it enjoys in some quarters - its Shostakovich interpretations have been wildly overpraised. Some of the problems stemmed of its founding leader Rostislav Dubinsky, a preening, narcissistic player. His successor Mikhail Kopelman brought a more human face to the ensemble, and his successor is perhaps the best violinist per se that the group has had. So it continues to evolve ..."

Another venerated ensemble gets a similar sneer:

Bartok and Beethoven were also the specialities of an another expatriate Magyar group that Sandor Vegh formed in 1940, not long after leaving the New Hungarian Quartet. He was able to keep his eponymous quartet together for more than three decades, even though his colleagues disliked him intensely. Végh himself could be an infuriatingly sloppy player - live recordings made as early as 1950 reveal him playing excruciatingly out of tune - and the group often sounded as if its members had not met before coming on stage (they lived in four separate cities). Vegh's outsize personality generally got them through, however. Records made in the 1950s and 1960s were variable and sometimes suprisingly dull; but in the early 1970s the players pulled themselves together long enough to make fine Bartok and Beethoven cycles. After the group fell apart, Végh soldiered on with two different formations, but with mixed success ..."

Quite funny. 

Maconchy - String Quartet nr. 3 & nr. 4

No fancy titles here. This is good old-fashioned 'durchkomponiertes' quartet material. A few weeks ago I sampled the short Third Quartet as an introduction to this collection of what seem to be 13 very nice specimens in the genre. I have relistened to it a number of times over the last couple of days and the work doesn't cease to impress me. The surefooted mix of heartfelt lyricism, a steely kind of resolve and a impressive level of intellectual concentration works wonders.

The String Quartet nr. 4 clearly comes from the same skillful pen. However it is a good deal more reserved, even austere, than its predecessor. Small wonder, perhaps, as it was composed in the darkest hours of the Second World War (1942-43). It's laid out in four movements coming in just under a quarter of an hour. The music is particularly tightly knit with the opening motive, for cello pizzicato, permeating the whole work. It is by no means an easy quartet. It requires repeated listening to probe under its rather opaque surface. By now I have heard it perhaps 6 or 7 times and I can sense that eventually this will become a work that is dear to me. It's not that the music is outrageously difficult. it's just very stern and aloof. I'll continue the exploration of this fine body of work with relish.

Volans - String Quartet nr. 1 'White Man Sleeps' & nr. 6

I've always had a special interest in Kevin Volans, a very intelligent South-African/Irish composer. I got hooked on his music through his quartets Hunting : Gathering (nr. 2) and The Songlines (nr. 3). I must have bought that CD many years ago when I was mesmerised by Bruce Chatwin's eponymous book. Why would I otherwise have invested in a CD of a completely unknown composer in a genre I wasn't very much into in those days? Anyway, the quartets stuck and I have listened to them many times. Later I added his First (White Man Sleeps), Fourth (Ramanujan Notebooks) and Fifth Quartet (Dancers on a Plane) also to the collection. Plus other works. A this point Volans seems to have written 10 quartets, the last four of which have not been recorded.

White Man Sleeps (1986) is his first foray in the genre. It originated as a piece for two harpsichords, viola da gamba and percussion (1982) and was later, at the Kronos Quartet's request, transcribed for strings. Volans' early language is easily recognisable. It's a unique blend of what we as Westerners perceive to be 'African' sounds and an avant garde idiom. At that point, Volans was searching for a paradigm shift in his own conception of music. He had been an assistant to Karlheinz Stockhausen for a couple of years, an opportunity to thoroughly immerse himself in a very architectural conception of music in which all aspects of it were systematically parametrised. It led to a situation where people had to preface a 15-minute piece by a 30-minute lecture. In an attempt to get away from this sterile approach he turned to minimalism and the street, folk and nature sounds of his native South Africa. This led to a materialist conception of music, in the tradition of Morton Feldman, where the material qualities of sound dictated the musical logic. With that came a much freer approach to composition. As a result, I'm thinking of Volans belonging to that group of composers such as Riley and Bryars who have a free, associative and narrative approach to music. This is what he writes in the booklet that goes with his Quartets nr. 2 and 3:

When I wrote Hunting : Gathering in 1987, I had grown tired of the 'composition etude' - the one-idea piece. I decided to try and write a piece which included as many different musical fragments as possible, strung together in a pseudo-narrative. To keep the fragments separate, each is written in a different key. As I wanted the different pieces to come and go in a random fashion like images or events on an unplanned journey, my principal problem was how to move from one key to another without any sense of development (i.e. without modulating). I was consciously trying to keep the overall scale of events constant, not allowing one piece to dominate the others unduly - rather than viewing everything against a fixed background. (...) Philip Guston tells of working on a painting in the 1950s where, in an effort to get away from form and into the material, he stood close up to the canvas, working quickly and not stepping back to look until the work was finished. In [The Songlines] I juxtaposed very different kinds of music in the order they occured to me, not thinking ahead, and allowing the material to unfold at its own pace. if there was a sense of form at work, it was covert. However, I didn't use everything that occured to me. I tried to follow Guston's suggestion of 'eliminating' both that which is yours already and that which is not yet yours' - in other words keeping only that which is becoming yours.

Now compare this account to Riley's notes accompanying Salome Dances for Peace:

What I do is to make many, many minute sketches of ideas and file them away, and at some point as I'm writing, one of those ideas will be the right one for the time. I trust the fact that anything that occurs to me is related to whatever that occured to me before. All kinds of music that appear in my string quartets are the kinds of music that I personally love, and I don't necessarily keep them in separate cabinets. One of the challenges, in fact, is to bring things you love together to live harmoniously.

There is certainly a correspondence in the way these two composer approach their craft: there is a sense of freedom, of respect for the musical material. There is also this evocation of abundance. Composing is invoking a choice algorithm. Exactly the opposite from the architectural composers for whom scarcity is the name of the game. Rather than to select from abundance, they want to make the most from the most minute scraps of musical material.

White Man Sleeps slightly predates Hunting : Gathering but seems to partake of a similar nature. It's, in fact, a suite of five dances. The first thing that strikes are the music's complex, irregular rhythmic patterns. They feel like they are modelled on speech patterns. The rhythm is often incisive, percussive even. There is genuinely fast music too. Then there is very little counterpoint. The music is by and large homophonic. The harmony strikes as very exotic but, as Volans suggests, it is also rather static (with very little modulation). Melodically, the music is very sophisticated with an abundance of remarkable thematic material. Altogether, these features lend the music exceptionally clear contours and a beguiling freshness. It sounds very intricate but at the same time it is also very accessible and invigorating. This is music that potentially could mean something to a wide audience without, however, dumbing itself down.

The Smith Quartet's performance on this CD (long disappeared from the catalogue) is truly excellent. The ensemble is still around and judging from their website they specialise in choice contemporary repertoire.

It's not easy to keep abreast of Volan's more recent development. His music was popular in the mid-1980s and several recording appeared that are now very hard to come by. Those with the Kronos Quartet, however, are still in Nonesuch's catalogue. In the mid-1990s Chandos issued a recording of his Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments. A transitional work, it seemed to me. I haven't particularly taken to it (but certainly need to give it another go). Since I haven't seen or heard any new work by Volans. I was intrigued, therefore, to find a recording of his Sixth Quartet (2000) by the Duke Quartet on YouTube. (I have their reading of the Fourth and Fifth Quartets too). Boy, was I in for a surprise! This is really something completely different: a 25-minute ambient extemporisation built on just a few chords that gives Brian Eno a run for his money. Allegedly Volans wrote it just in a single day. And it's actually not a quartet but an octet as a live quartet is multi-tracked electronically.

Triviality of masterpiece? I'm inclined to give Volans the benefit of the doubt. At first hearing the work does make an impression. In this interview Volans explains what pushed him in this direction. It's basically an extrapolation of his desire to overcome style and form in his work. With the Sixth Quartet he also tried to overcome 'content' (hence also the absence of suggestive title). It's not only a question of technique, but also of ethos:

Basically I think now I’m trying to write guiltlessly. Really without guilt. It’s a hard thing to do (...) you can’t live your life looking over your shoulder. That’s what stifles true creativity. Even Feldman – I mean, I adored the man, but Feldman was part of a macho crowd, the big boys of art. They definitely competed with each other – and he cornered the market in long pieces. I thought, we’ve got to get rid of this too – Feldman guilt! I suppose what I’m also trying to point to is the idea of overcoming testosterone. You don’t have to prove anything.

It's an intriguing position, but one likely that comes with its own pitfalls. Is this quest for 'the view from nowhere', for a very particular kind of purity at one point not becoming an ideology also?

Luckily, his late work demonstrates that Volans is keeping his wits about it and not losing himself in Cagean 'mind and sound games'. There is a live recording of his Second Piano Concerto 'Atlantic Crossing' (ah, the title again) on YouTube. Plenty of notes in that one. Here Volans seems to gravitate the kind of postmodern pastiche familiar from John Adams (with some Bernstein quotes thrown in for good measure). From what I hear it is fantastically well done.

Volans is certainly a composer that makes me sit up and think. Apart from that his music strikes me as enormously imaginative. I just hope we'll have some more recordings of both old and recent work (the orchestral piece One Hundred Frames, the Concerto for Double Orchestra, the late quartets) coming our way.

Bartok - String Quartet nr. 4

Despite the expanding scope of my excursion in the quartet repertoire, I haven't lost sight of Bartok. I'm planning to weave his six quartets in this continuing exploration. I revisited the Fourth Quartet which featured on my playing list already a few weeks ago, in performances by the Belcea, Juilliard, Keller en Vegh Quartet. This time I listened to the Zehetmair Quartett on ECM and the Takacs Quartet on Decca.

Returning to this particular piece after a string of other quartets, most of which have really pleased me, is a sobering experience as the scale of Bartok's accomplishment becomes even more abundantly clear. Maybe the only piece I recently heard that is able to provide some (emotional) counterweight to Bartok's musical equivalent of a supernova is Schnittke's Third Quartet. The Gorecki, which I listened to yesterday, is also a very fine piece of work and in its savage rusticity clearly has a kinship with Bartok's Fourth. But the point is that Bartok composed his quartet 60 years earlier than Gorecki. Kind of makes the point how visionary the former was.

The recording by the Zehetmair Quartett has met with considerable critical acclaim. It is indeed a ruthless reading of a ruthless piece. And yet it did not convince me. Allegedly the ensemble plays the piece by heart. And they play it brutally fast. The result is a performance with an air of frantic improvisation, as if we see an action painter at work. Maybe I was not in the right frame of mind, but for me it didn't work. I had the feeling to remain a fairly dispassionate onlooker at all these pyrotechnics. Another observation is that the recording of the ensemble is so sonically rich that it sounds more like a chamber ensemble than a quartet. I'll certainly give it another shot, but I am not at all sure it will change my assessment. The Takacs immediately sounded more to the point. Theirs is also a savage reading but I felt it to be more grounded and coherent. It does have its moments of unpleasant harshness though. Sampling the Belcea again, I find there the optimal balance between the Dyonisian and the Apollinian, between concentration and refinement.

Gorecki - String Quartet nr. 1 'Already It Is Dusk'

Gorecki's String Quartet nr. 1, op. 62 (1988) is a crazy piece. But I've held it in high esteem ever since I got hold of this Kronos Quartet CD (again!), where the quartet is coupled with an even wackier (and more spellbindingly beautiful) Lerchenmusik (for clarinet, piano and cello).

The quartet is short. But it packs a punch in its 14 minutes. It is composed in a very clear tripartite structure, starting with a very contemplative Molto lento, tranquillo, giving way to a wild Allegro deciso and returning to the Molto lento. The foundational theme (and the quartet's title) is taken from a four-part churchsong by a 16th century Polish composer. The melody is prominently presented in the Molto lento as a canonic cantus firmus, interrupted three times by fierce, dissonant chordal interjections. The polystylistic clashes remind of Schnittke. The Allegro deciso explodes like a bombshell. It's a no holds barred, obsessive country dance, lashing the unisono strings at a frantic speed from the highest registers to the lowest. An amazing piece of music that Gorecki has annotated with furioso, marcatissimo, tempestoso, con massima passione. It stops as abruptly as it started. Follows a repeat of the canon, pianissimo, and a very short, balmy coda showered with tonal, triadic harmony. Beautiful.

No reservations here as regards the performance of the Kronos Quartet. It's just perfect, it seems to me. The recording, taped at their usual venue Skywalker Ranch, is good too. As usual, it's not very spacious but I think that works well with the claustrofobic density of the music. The Lerchenmusik is fantastically performed too. The booklet notes by David Drew are very informative. Unfortunately the CD has disappeared from the Nonesuch catalogue.

Panufnik - String Quartet nr. 2 'Messages' & nr. 3 'Wycinanki'

Panufnik is a composer that is difficult fathom. He seems to be Janus-faced. On the one side we hear a composer who is able and eager to please with a colourful and accessible idiom that, sometimes, flirts with sentimentality. I'm primarily thinking of some of his 'spiritual' pieces, such as the slow movement of the Sinfonia Sacra, in which he beautifully captures the simple but ardent devotion (particularly for the Virgin Mary) that must have been endemic in the Poland of yore. The other side is that of a watchmaker, obsessed with fitting every bar within a larger whole that is often based on a very arcane, geometrically-inspired design. His Arbor Cosmica is a good example of the kind of almost impenetrable, austere music that can emerge from that infatuation with rigid architecture. This dualism seems to be mirrored in this persona: on the one hand a social climber (Sir ...), and a little vain, on the other hand a scrupulously honest, hardworking and uncompromising artist.

Panufnik wrote three quartets (1976, 1980, 1991, respectively). The Second is named 'Messages'. The story is this:

"When I was seven or eight years old, on holiday in the country, my favourite pastime was to put my ear to the wooden telegraphy poles and listen to the sounds produced by the poles vibrating in the wind. After a while I became convinced that I was listening to real music - which retrospectively I think was my first experience of the creative process, as for the first time I made use of my musical imagination."

The result is, however, a little less poetic than the background might lead us to expect. 'Messages' sounds to me rather like an academic exercise than a recreation of a visceral childhood memory. The beginning is quite evocative, with a wistful four note motive emerging from ppp harmonics on unisono strings (very similar to the opening of Bryars' Second Quartet, by the way). This four note cell is complemented with a three note motif and from this modest material Panufnik builds a rigid scaffolding for the single movement, 19 minute long composition. It's not that the music is bad. It just sounds a little dry and schoolmasterish. The ubiquity of the two cells lends the music also a certain rhythmic inflexibility. Bernard Jacobson makes a bogus claim in the booklet notes that 'if there is an earlier composer to the listener's mind in relation to the drooping chromaticism of the main theme, it is Bartok.' Anyway, I listened to it twice and in both cases the piece failed to keep my attention until the very end.

The Third Quartet, however, is a good deal more interesting. Again there is a story:

'The quartet emerged from my lifelong attachment to the rustic art of Poland, especially the paper cuts ('wycinanki') symmetrical designs of magical abstract beauty and naive charm.' 

So the 10 minute work, written as a test piece for a quartet competition, consists of five linked miniature studies. The first connects to the slow beginning of previous quartet, with hovering, vibratoless music. The second is warmly lyrical and songful. The third is a study in pizzicato playing. The fourth is an agressive scherzo, with unisono, pounding strings (reminded me of his countryman Gorecki's First Quartet, by the way). And the last part is one of those richly harmonised, devotional Lentos Panufnik seems to have a trademark on. Despite its modest origins, this quartet is solid workmanship that bears repeated listening.

Schnittke - String Quartet nr. 3

Schnittke's Third String Quartet dates from 1983. The early to mid eighties were likely the apogee of his artistic development with a string of major works such as the First Cello Concerto, the Faust Cantata, the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies, the Concerto for Mixed Choir,  and the Concerto for Viola and Orchestra. This is, for me, core Schnittke territory. At this point his rowdy polystilism had matured into a musical language of shattering power and depth.

The Third Quartet is a worthy exemplar of Schnittke's mature output. It is a fairly short work, just under 20 minutes. But despite the relative brevity it plunges shuddering depths. The polystilism is still there, to be sure. In the first two minutes only there is a bewildering succession of thematic material:  a Lassus quote (Stabat Mater); a Russian folksong; a tortured, highly chromatic descending motive; and an archtypical Schnittke signature in the form of a series of unisono chords in lush triads suggesting a fractured kind of epiphany. This fragmentation marks the whole quartet. Harmonic worlds don't cease to collide. Mahlerian marches intersect with drinking songs and the lofty spiritualism of the Lassus polyphony. The unisono chords resurface, as a kind of motto theme. The effect is like being submerged in a musical maelstrom with just an occasional breath of air. There are three movements (Andante - Agitato - Pesante), but they are played without breaks and it is not at all obvious when one ends and the next begins. The quartet is a continuous, nightmarish succession of visions. And yet somehow it all fits together. There is not an obvious slow movement either. Only towards the end some sort of exhausted tranquility settles over the music, but I would certainly disagree with Solomon Volkov who claims in the booklet notes that "the Third Quartet ultimately conveys a peaceful, almost contented mood, so rarely present in Schnittke's music." For me, the quartet is a bleak distopian landscape as is the Fifth Symphony and the Viola Concerto. But as always with Schnittke there is a dry-eyed stoicism and a magnanimous acceptance underpinning it all. I find this to be deeply Russian, deeply Dostojevskian. Honestly, I could just continue to listen to this music.

The performance by the Kronos Quartet certainly speaks, although I have a persistent feeling (as often with this ensemble) that something is missing. The recording is only average. In contrast with the other pieces on this double CD, this quartet was recorded at Methuen Memorial Hall. Despite the size of the hall, the recording feels rather airless. In terms of interpretation, I feel the Kronos might have gone a little further in exploring the depths of the score. I have ordered a rival recording by the Borodin Quartet (coupled with the Piano Quintet; deleted from the Virgin catalogue but still available second hand).

Bryars - String Quartet nr. 1 & 2

I'm not sure what kind of composer Gavin Bryars really is. Earlier I have written about his Piano Concerto, which I found rather flaccid and uninspired. I also have his famous Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet, an early conceptual piece from 1971 (featuring Tom Waits). But I don't think that I have listened to this more than three times.  Arguably these two pieces form only the tip of the iceberg that is a vast and very eclectic body of work, including music for voice, for the theater and for a wide variety of ensembles. However, the album that keeps Bryars for me in considerable standing is a 1995 recording of his two string quartets on the Argo label (now deleted).

I have listened to these two quartets oftentimes. Usually, I take them back to back. The Second Quartet (1990) seems to pick up where the First ('Between the National and the Bristol') leaves off. There are several commonalities between the pieces which renders their fusion in a 45-minute whole a plausible listening strategy. Both pieces are of almost equal duration (21:55 for the First, 23:46 for the Second). It feels like they are based on a shared compositional philosophy. Bryars seems to be a minimalist in a similar vein as Riley: his best music is 'simple', in a sophisticated kind of way. If the musical process is guided in any way by thematic development, I can't really hear it. The logic is much more narratively oriented, as a succession of clearly demarcated sections of 3 to 7 minutes' length (but in contrast to Riley's Salome, for instance, we don't know the story behind the quartets; also Bryars' suggestive titles for many of his works seem to confirm this narrative bent). Also the mood of both quartets overlaps: they are lyrical, faintly elegiac in tone. I don't think there is a fff anywhere to be heard. Tempos are slow to moderato. The texture is very often composed of two layers of which one consists of long, flowing lines with a gently lapping or more agressively pulsating layer underneath. Also important in both works is the use of harmonics, lending the music often an eery, silvery quality and trailing rustic, faintly Eastern European resonances in their wake. Given all these qualities, is it a surprise then that I'm invariably reminded of Milan Kundera's novels when I listen to these quartets?

I believe the superb rendition of these scores by the Balanescu Quartet is absolutely key here. This is the kind of music that in lesser hands simply falls apart. The Balanescu play these quartets with the most sincere conviction and supreme artistry, saving them from slipping into bathos. It's a pity we don't hear a lot anymore from this ensemble. It's rather more a fluid group of musicians around the pivotal figure of Alexander Balanescu (ex second violinist of the Arditti, ex leader of the Michael Nyman Band). (I have another excellent disc of them, with two superb quartets by Kevin Volans. I'll return to that very soon.) On the Bryars CD I would also like to single out the very sensitive playing by cellist Sian Bell (a principal with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra these days).

Haydn - String Quartet op. 33 nr. 3

From the minimalists to the classics. I picked an arbitrary Haydn quartet, op. 33 (the Russian quartets, from 1781), nr. 3, nicknamed ‘The Bird’. Despite it being in a radiant C major, it mixes light and shadow in a most affecting whole. The first movement, Allegro moderato, opens with this graceful theme with repeated notes lending it its birdlike quality. Despite the light-footedness and poise, there is something faintly bittersweet in the music. That is even more outspoken in the short Allegretto which strikes one as really pensive and wistful. And yet there is fiber and masculinity too. The slow movement is a genuine, probing conversation amongst friends. The Rondo-finale is short and boisterous with a whiff of à la zingarese. The Quatuor Mosaïques play the music with great feeling and authority. No pyrotechnics, no pumped-up expressiveness. Just plain, honest music-making. Beautiful recording too. Haydn never ceases to amaze.

Riley - Salome Dances for Peace

Riley's Salome Dances for Peace (1985-86) must be a pretty unique specimen in the quartet literature. It's a composition of almost 2 hours grafted on the backbone of a fanciful narrative. It goes like this: "In Riley's narrative, the heroine is Salome, the legendary seductress in King Herod's court who called for the head of John the Baptist to be brought to her on a plate in return for removing her seven veils during a lewd dance. Now, 2000 years after Salome's famous dance, peace has been stolen from the earth by dark forces and Salome is chosen to bring it back. In Anthem of the Great Spirit, the first part of Salome Dances for Peace, Salome is summoned to the Great Spirit, who sees in her the embodiment of the feminine force. Throughout this first section of the score, she is guided by sages in a Peace Dance; she receives the gift of innocence in Fanfare in the Minimal Kingdom; she develops the discipline to thwart Wild Talker, who represents sexual temptation; and she is initiated as a warrior by the shaman Half Wolf during More Ceremonial Races. 

In order to fulfill her mission, Salome and Half Wolf descend into the gloomy underworld (...). In Conquest of the War Demons, which is the quartet's largeste development section, a battle is fought, peace recaptured, and the entire underworld, with all its fantastic beings, levitated into the Realm of Light. 

Once more a dance, Salome entertains around the world - in The Gift, we find her in Tibet, and, as the music becomes more folklike, Mongolia. Once again she is charged with a mission: to attract the attention of the world's two most powerful leaders. Seducing both the Bear Father and the Great White Father, which leads to the latter's emotional breakdown and finally to epiphany in The Ecstasy, Salome succeeds in winning world peace. The score ends with the Good Medicine Dance, a return to old wisdom and teachings, with the counsel to become guileless and pursue self-knowledge" (from Mark Swed's notes in the CD booklet). Most unusual stuff for a composition (though not half as ridiculous as Strauss' program for his Sinfonia Domestica). It reminds me a little about Castanada's teachings of Don Juan. 

I've patiently dug into the music for a week now. The double CD had been in the house for a long time, but I never really took the opportunity to listen to it. I believe the time I spent listening to it again and again this week has very well paid off.

As indicated by the booklet extract, the work falls into five parts. To give a sense of scale, here are indicative timings I took from Schirmer's website (the booklet doesn't show timings at all):

Anthem of the Great Spirit (33:00)

Conquest of the War Demons (33:47)

The Gift (18:21)

The Ecstasy (15:24)

Good Medicine (13:25)

Each part is played without breaks, despite the division into a more finegrained narrative sequence. How to characterise this music? Taken at face value, it is not 'difficult'. It is tonal, and even pleasingly so. And yet because of its length and texture it presents an obvious challenge to the listener. Melodically, dynamically and rhythmically it can, at first sight, come across as fairly monotonous. The dominant expression is one of listening to a rich, busy musical tapestry of which motifs and hues are constantly changing. In that sense the work certainly inscribes itself in a minimalist aesthetic.  

The music sounds folksy in an oblique kind of way. It's understated and solemn, priestly at the same time. The first part, the Anthem, is generally slow and very reflective. I can imagine that the casual listener never gets beyond this first chapter. The Conquest is more lively and contrapuntal and has indeed more of a development character. However, exuberant it is not. The Gift is again more thoughtful and brings with it the luminosity and sense of space of the Tibetan high plateau and Mongolian steppes. This is the most easily accessible and colourful part of the score. The Epiphany is the most mysterious section. There are echoes of Bartok's Mandarin (also a seduction scene). However, the music is extremely relaxed in a parlando kind of style and hardly rises above piano dynamics. Only the At the Summit section is more lively and folksy. Good Medicine is then a fairly robust dance that brings the work to an upbeat, festive conclusion. 

The Kronos Quartet play this whole work with remarkable leisureliness. It's as if they had been smoking pot during the recording sessions at Skywalker Ranch, north of San Francisco.  There certainly is a potential for more dynamic contrasts in this score, but they must have consciously abstained from doing so. This certainly have contributed to the dreamlike quality of the music. At this point there is no alternative recording available, I believe, but it seems to me there is certainly a place for other interpretations.

I am writing as if the whole Salome suite is to be considered as a single work. I assume it is, although the Schirmer website, for example, annotates Good Medicine as String Quartet nr. 10. Riley himself seems to be very cavalier about this. His website includes a partial list of works and there we find simply reference to Salome as a 5-part work for string quartet. I believe it does hold up well as a giant quartet. Structurally it seems to make sense (although there is no way it can be squeezed into a traditional formal template). 

Discophage, one of the more erudite reviewers on Amazon, thought "the music is wonderfully colorful and inventive, 20th century timeless, immensely appealing, going through a wide variety of moods, very free in construction but the juxtapositions always sound organic. This is not high-browed music (and don't get me wrong: I enjoy high-browed music) but still it is highly cultivated, drawing upon a vast but concealed knowledge of both vernacular and art music." It's one of his favourite quartets of the latter half of the 20th century (with Ligeti, Dutilleux, Lutoslawski and Isang Yun). I can certainly go along with the general line of his assessment. Salome is a very fine piece of work. Like Haydn it cleans the palate and creates space in the mind. It sounds like music that has been composed by a wise, free and childlike spirit.

A very pleasant discovery to which I will certainly return. I'd like to get hold of Riley's Requiem for Adam too.

Beethoven - String Quartet nr. 11 'Serioso'

Beethoven's 'Serioso' quartet, op. 95, is a fabulous composition that has given me a lot of satisfaction the last couple of days. It's likely the most condensed and tightly knit of all of his works in this genre. Barely 20 minutes long, it contains a wealth of ideas and has a impressively symphonic impetus. All these elements plus the pounding rhythms and jagged dynamics remind me of Bartok's Third Quartet.

The Serioso is mostly lumped together with the middle quartets. Remarkably, it would be another twelve years before Beethoven would write another quartet. But the musical language is at that point, 1810, already hinting at what will come later. So a number of ensembles, such as the Takacs, have included the Op. 95 in their survey of late quartets.

The first movement, an extremely compressed sonata structure, has been very aptly compared to a 'coiled spring'. It's Beethoven at his most gruff and impetuous but also at his most clever. Most modern ensembles play this with fearsome energy and razor sharp attacks. It's the Emerson aesthetic. Quartets from the older schools, such as the Borodin or Italiano or Gewandhaus Quartet, seem to present a more poised approach. At first I was taken aback by the virulence exhibited by the Artemis Quartet. Is it really necessary to get the last ounce of aggressive energy out of the score? I wasn't sure. But after listening to some of the other readings, I was convinced by the coherence of their vision and the appropriateness of their approach. In their performance there is plenty of space for beautiful ensemble playing and sweet intonation. But the allegros sound as if Beethoven was pounding his fists on the table. In comparison the Quartetto Italiano (on LP), usually one of my favourites, do seem a bit cautious and tame. Also successful, as somewhat of a middle of the road version, is the Alban Berg in their 1979 recording. Sadly the recording is less than stellar and the performance as a whole seems to vaccilate between contemporary expressiveness and traditional old world splendour.

The Artemis, then, convinced. The complex second movement, in D major, is beautifully done with the dirge-like accompaniment of the songlike theme on the violin and the second theme which sounds as if Beethoven had been studying baroque masters. Its fugato treatment certainly seems to confirm this. In its terseness it is a very complete and satisfying movement that displays an amazing gamut of emotions. The third movement, a scherzo, is simple in layout with an abruptly rhythmic theme that alternates with a chorale-like trio. Then the finale, which trumps all the other movements in originality: the somber larghetto introduction, a stormy rondo with a theme that seems to have amazing symphonic potential, and the breezy coda, which has nothing to do with anything that went before it, as a concluding practical joke.

The Virgin recording of the Artemis Quartet is, on the whole, very good. I find the setting (the trusted Jesus-Christus Kirche in Dahlem, Berlin) only a little too resonant. It particularly matters in the scherzo where the hectic musical proceedings are interspersed with frequent pauses. But otherwise it's amongst the best I've heard. This CD was the first installment of their complete cycle which, after fiver years, happened to be rounded off earlier this month.

Shostakovich - String Quartet nr. 1

I feel like a quartet spree and am planning to listen to 10 unfamiliar quartets in the next 2 weeks or so. Seeking out unfamiliar repertoire is not so hard as I'm not so well at home in the quartet literature. And whatever I may have heard I need to spend more time with. So basically everything is ok. I'm taking Prokofiev's Second as the starting point and have meanwhile moved on to Shostakovich's String Quartet nr. 1, op. 49.

Shostakovich's First Quartet is a short and sweet affair in radiant C major. A trifle, however, it is not. The work already points forward to the later quartets, such as the Ninth. The composer himself thought it was 'spring-like'. It doesn't seem to make sense to write something innocuous like that in 1938, at the height of Stalinist terror and in the wake of vicious ideological attack. Or maybe it does. Maxim was just born. And likely the composer was engaged in a process of Innere Emigration. Back to whatever serenity remains in one's own core.

I listened to three versions: the Brodsky Quartet (Teldec, 1989), the Fitzwilliam Quartet (Decca, around 1976) and the Eder Quartet (Naxos, 1994). There is no doubt that the Fitzwilliam is head and shoulders above the rest. The Eders are docile and seem to lack ideas. The Brodskys have too many ideas but lack a coherent vision to hold them together. The Fitzwilliam Quartet shower the work with delicate luminosity. The tone is rich, mellow, luxuriant. Under their hands the emotional complexities of particularly the first and last movements emerge. The introductory Moderato, with its long lines, assumes a poignancy that goes straight to the heart. It almost turns into a lamento. Oh God, that Russian summer of 1938 ... (Wikipedia: ... by 1938, however, the oppression had become so extensive that it was damaging the infrastructure, economy and even the armed forces of the Soviet state, prompting Stalin to wind the purge down. In September, Beria was appointed head of the Main Administration of State Security (GUGB) of the NKVD, and in November he succeeded Yezhov as NKVD head (Yezhov himself was executed in 1940). The NKVD itself was then purged, with half its personnel replaced by Beria loyalists, many of them from the Caucasus). The finale is boisterous (a study almost of the Sixth Symphony's finale) but once in a while the Fitzwilliams flash their teeth in anger. The 1976 Decca recording is excellent.

It's quiet around the Fitzwilliam Quartet these days. At least they don't seem to play in the top league anymore. I looked it up and they still exist, after more than 40 years, and seem to have made some recordings recently on the Linn label. Their sympathetic website gives a good overview of their repertoire. Alan George, viola, is the only founding member still in place (since 1968). The quartet acquired renown because of their affiliation with the late Shostakovich who entrusted the British premiere of his last three quartets to them. His fifteen quartets still belong to the core of their repertoire.