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CD Booklet 0053 RPM.qxd 03-04-2012 14:59 Page 1 JACK Quartet Ligeti · Pintscher Cage · Xenakis CD Booklet 0053 RPM.qxd 03-04-2012 14:59 Page 2 JACK QUARTET PLAYS LIGETI, PINTSCHER, CAGE & XENAKIS The programme of four works the JACK Quartet energy of a young quartet discovering these works gave as its blisteringly assured Wigmore Hall anew and making them its own, as well as the debut in July 2011 says much about the group’s additional energy it must derive from knowing that identity as a quartet. On one level a history of these are not every quartet’s classics – from being the post-war string quartet in four snapshots, able to build, as it were, a canon outside the composed at roughly twenty-year intervals (1950, canon. 1968, 1983 and 2009), it immediately announces In many ways the programme the Quartet has the group’s commitment to new sounds, new lan- chosen here orbits around György Ligeti’s guages, new ways of conceiving the relationship astonishing String Quartet No. 2. The JACK’s of four string players in a genre which over cellist Kevin McFarland has drawn attention to nearly 250 years of existence has shown itself the work’s influence on later composers’ quartet- remarkably able to support innovation as well as writing, particularly in its employment of ‘sounds tradition. The most recent of these pieces is by and sonic characteristics hovering at the edge of Matthias Pintscher – a composer with whom the perception’. The gravitational field of the work JACK Quartet has a strong personal relationship – pulls in history as well as the future, so that we and its presence pays tribute to the group’s may also glimpse a pre-war visitor on the horizon: frequent collaborations with living composers: Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4, to which Ligeti pays like other quartets committed to new music, they homage most obviously by including, like Bartók, have assumed the role of muse as well as both a muted movement (although in Ligeti’s the advocate. mutes come off halfway through) and an entirely And yet the further inclusion of two works pizzicato movement. In Bartók’s piece these written for such other quartets – one for the Arditti movements are contrasted doubles – analogous, Quartet (the JACK’s teachers and now occasional perhaps, to two drawings of the same scene, one collaborators) and one for an equally pioneering in charcoal and one in fine pencil – and are placed earlier group, the LaSalle Quartet – registers an second and fourth in a quasi-symmetrical five- important difference at the same time as placing movement arch form. In Ligeti’s quartet the five- the JACK Quartet firmly in that line of succession. movement structure is retained but the symmetry Founded when only one of the four composers is abandoned in favour of a form in which every represented here was still alive, the Quartet movement is in some sense a version (or a comes to this music as a quartet might more memory, or a compression) of the same material ordinarily come to works from an earlier century. but in which these similarities are disguised Modernism now has its own classics, and the under a surface characterised by juxtaposition, energy so abundantly on display here is the contrast and abruptness. 2 CD Booklet 0053 RPM.qxd 03-04-2012 15:00 Page 3 The effects of such compression are perhaps most spectacularly evident in the fourth move- ment (‘If this movement is played properly, a lot of bow hair will be loose by the end’, Ligeti notes in the score!), but McFarland points out how the technical challenges of the whole piece are closely tied into its musical rewards: particularly, he says, in terms of ‘marry[ing] the technical precision with the subtle shaping of linesand dynamics. There is a good bit of risk involved in this, as many of the quick and often polyrhythmic passages become much more difficult as the dynamic extremes are pressed.’ The resultant sense of tension and excitement in both loud and quiet music makes this a particularly thrilling work to experience live. In fact the same is true of all four works in this recital, all of which might be heard as discovering GYÖRGY LIGETI ways of taking the pitch-centred innovations of earlier modernism and contextualising them not increasingly prophetic, and it is apposite that both only through new forms of attention to rhythm composers should be found today in the company and dynamics but also, crucially, by equally or of a younger colleague like Pintscher, whose even more important innovations in timbre and works – like Xenakis’s – suggest a sculptor in in playing technique. Music in the later twentieth sound almost as much as a composer, although century may be more complex and various they are quite unlike Xenakis’s in taking as their than ever before, but it has also rediscovered field of action an instrumental realm of extreme instrumental specificity and the theatricality of quietness and delicacy (the dynamic level of the live performance. present work never rising above mezzo-piano). Such a development might have surprised a Study IV for Treatise on the Veil is the most follower of new music in the 1960s, when Ligeti and recent of four related chamber works (Studies I–III Iannis Xenakis were still, within the context of the being for violin/cello duo, string trio, and solo European avant-garde, lone voices against a serial violin respectively). ‘Treatise on the Veil’ is the or post-serial hegemony. As the avant-garde’s pre- overall title of a series of drawings and two large occupations shifted away from pitch structure in paintings by the American artist Cy Twombly the ensuing decade, those voices came to sound (1928–2011), whose work Pintscher has cited 3 CD Booklet 0053 RPM.qxd 03-04-2012 15:00 Page 4 extra depth by the ‘extended’ playing techniques which make the occasional normale note or phrase stand out like a sudden figurative element in a Twombly painting. The sound of the instru- ments is further altered – ‘veiled’ – through two actions applied before performance: the viola’s Cand G stringsare retuned (down a fourth and amajor third respectively), and allfour players ‘prepare’ their lowest two (or in the case of the viola three) strings with metal paperclips attached near the bridge. Innovation, in both technique and expression, is a feature of all the works in this recital, but we shouldn’t mistake its presence for a concern with a linear model of ‘progress’. The simplicity and MATTHIAS PINTSCHER JOHN CAGE quirkiness of the oldest work here, John Cage’s © Andrea Medici, Baci&Baci Studio, NY String Quartet in Four Parts, resonate just as as a frequent inspiration, though perhaps what strongly with our twenty-first-century sensibilities attracted him most here were the intriguing possi- as does the more linguistically ‘advanced’ bilities of the title, its suggestion of a complex Pintscher; and although (ostensibly) in the chain of thought about different media: a musical classically correct four movements, it is certainly ‘study’ on a work of visual art titled as if it were less structurally traditional than the twenty-years- an academic manuscript. Even its last term, ‘veil’, younger Ligeti work, whose refraction of Classical turns out to be richly polyvalent, suggesting quartet structure through Bartókian/constructivist various forms of both auditory and visual symmetries surely remains closer to the genre’s distancing but also (crossing media, or domains discursive origins. Cage, with characteristic plain- of knowledge, yet again) referring to the velo, a ness, calls his movements ‘parts’, and according drawing instrument developed by Leonardo da to the composer they represent summer in Paris Vinci to analyse and represent perspective. (where he began composing the work in August Against this background of ideas the work’s 1949, towards the end of a six-month European musical effects are startlingly vivid. Perspective sojourn funded by the success of his recent is evoked by whispered scurryings set against Sonatas and Interludes), autumn in New York, and magically sustained harmonic tones, the constant a long and immobile winter before spring arrives hyper-detailing of very quiet, mobile sounds given in a sudden burst of concluding freshness. Thus 4 CD Booklet 0053 RPM.qxd 03-04-2012 15:00 Page 5 some more complex combinations – and com- posed the quartet entirely with reference to these pre-defined ‘gamuts’ (as he called them). In a sense the quartet has become a prepared instrument itself, on which the composer plays. Dynamics and rhythm vary widely, but every time a melody note recurs it has the same accom- panying harmony (or lack of accompaniment); the same timbre; the same registral placement and the same scoring, down to precisely which string each player uses. Cage’s calibration of sound is as exact as Pintscher’s, and as radically yet idiomatically focused on the instruments: another meeting-place for those deceptive categories of ‘simple’ and ‘complex’. IANNIS XENAKIS A consequence of the ‘gamut’ technique was that counterpoint was essentially abolished, and the turn of the seasons issues in renewal, and harmony became a function of timbre, or instru- the work chimes with ideas Cage had been mental colour. These matters were perhaps only a encountering in Indian philosophy, of cyclic side-effect so far as Cage was concerned, but the structures tending towards balance and calm. abolition of all traditional musical categories is In dissolving the genre’s traditional formal absolutely central to the effect of Xenakis’s Tetras, rhetoric Cage also re-imagined its sound, asking in which the quartet seems to have been re- the players to play without vibrato; the result is conceived as a single giant ‘super-instrument’ – a closer to a Renaissance string consort than to a body of sixteen strings and four bows sawing and Classical quartet.