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.