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 ...