Ligeti: String Quartets Nos 1 & 2; Bartók: String Quartet No 4 (BIS)
★★★★☆
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It’s 30 years since I heard Gyorgy Ligeti clarify why he was permitting his first string quartet to be carried out after 4 many years mendacity in a drawer. The quartet, composed in 1954, was too near its sources. “It’s Bartók’s seventh,” mentioned Ligeti, “however I’ve now realised that’s not such a nasty factor.”
Titled Metamorphoses Nocturnes, the quartet has buzzing bugs, whispering grasses and lots of issues that go bump within the evening. In amidst the feral noises there are wistful strains of melody and a macabre sense of humour, blacker by far than Bartók’s Bluebeard. Now and again, a Haydn chord is heard. Consider it as a bridge between pre- and post-war modernism, written below the heavy hand of Hungarian state communism. Two years later, Ligeti fled west.
His second quartet, dated 1968, is likewise transitional. Written in a revolutionary yr, it opens with an Allegro nervosa through which the composer departs from Boulez-Stockhausen serialism right into a frank and brutal encounter with real-world music that folks may need to hear. As ever in Ligeti, there may be waspish wit, nasty moments and episodes of transcendental calm and delicacy. Ligeti is the least predictable of composers, probably the most satisfying to a questing thoughts, the proper antidote to end-of-year mush.
Between the 2 Ligetis, the Marmen Quartet ship Bartók’s fourth string quartet of 1928, Mozartian by comparability with its neighbours.
The hour-long album is lustily and lyrically performed by 4 Europeans who met in 2013 on the Royal Faculty of Music, earlier than London grew to become too Brexity troublesome for continentals to finish their research. The Marmens, cast in a unique age, remind us of a lot that has been misplaced, not least an inexpensive alternative to discover Ligeti’s bumpetty world, on the market on the fringe of the recognized universe.
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Norman Lebrecht is likely one of the most widely-read commentators on music, tradition and cultural politics. He’s a daily presenter on BBC Radio 3 and a contributor to the Wall Road Journal, Bloomberg, Standpoint, Sinfini and different publications. His weblog, Slipped Disc, is among the many most generally learn cultural websites on-line, breaking unique tales and campaigning in opposition to human abuse and acts of injustice within the cultural industries.
