San Francisco Classical Voice

CONTEMPORARY MUSIC REVIEW Hitting One Note, Very Well

March 11, 2002

Arditti Quartet

By Michael Fiday

Though the first may lack the somewhat glitzy reputation of the second, both the Arditti and Kronos Quartets are often cited as the two preeminent advocates of 20th/21st-century string-quartet repertoire. A stereotypical comparison has the two ensembles occupying opposing ends of an aesthetic spectrum: Kronos as a champion of pulse-oriented works which embrace either vernacular or "world" cultures, the Arditti as continuing a European tradition favoring a more abstract language built upon rhythmic complexity and dissonance saturation — i.e. while the Arditti is "modernist", Kronos is "post . . ."

This is not an entirely-reliable account, for there are overlaps and exceptions: Kronos has been known to play some fairly thorny stuff from time to time, and I have heard American works commissioned by Arditti which were extraordinarily tonal and eclectic. Such was not the case, however, at the Aditti Quartet's Monday-night program at San Francisco's Herbst Theatre, where they played the role of staunch defenders of European High Modernism, bringing into sharp relief the style's various assets, liabilities and limitations.

The evening's best offering was Bent Sørensen's luminescent Angel's Music, which proved that this music, at its best, could be striking and individualistic. Sørensen's work had a very compelling way of working inside of a limited space. Though an almost constant, restless scurry of notes, its surface is predominantly static, its range confined to a very high register, its dynamic seldom venturing beyond pianissimo. (Practice mutes, normally used by string players who wish to practice late at night without disturbing the neighbors, were used during much of the work.) The effect is one that an acquaintance during intermission described as "insects swarming around the inside of a large bell."

Close ensemble

What was also fascinating about Angel's Music was its relative lack of foreground or background, as if the Arditti were all playing one large instrument. True, the cello had a mild role as anchor, playing slower melodic fragments amidst the frenzy of the other players. But the ear had to penetrate the work's surface in order to bring this out, much like the eye picking a dominating line out of the fray of a Jackson Pollock painting. The Arditti's performance was shimmering and attentive, as befits this restless meditation.

While Sørensen's work is of a singular focus, Wolfgang Rihm's String Quartet No. 3 (Im Innersten), which closed the evening's performance, inhabits a vast range of emotional extremes. Of considerable length, but divided into six shorter expressionistic character sketches, Rihm's quartet veers wildly between music of great aggression, complexity and ugliness and that of a hushed sensitivity (the subtitle loosely translates as "at the most intimate level").

Even more stark is the contrast between diverse pitch vocabularies: highly angular and dissonant music which increasingly gives way to overtly romantic harmonies. (One passage found violinist Irvine Arditti playing an impassioned quasi-improvisation over a faux jazz-standard progression gone wrong — Stephane Grappelli in Darmstadt!)

Resuscitation

While the gesture of having whiffs of tonal music nostalgically peer through and dissolve back into an atonal scrim is by now a cliché, such was not the case in 1976, when Rihm composed his quartet at the tender age of 24. (Such gestures, in fact, mirrored a similar mid-70's zeitgeist in this country at the hands of composers such as Crumb and Rochberg.) The Arditti's attacked Rihm's opus with a sense of strident abandon, with Dov Scheindlin striking his instrument as if it were a drum, grimacing as if he'd just swallowed bad gin.

The evening's two remaining works showed typical modernist fare of Arditti variety at its most problematic. Australian composer Mary Finsterer's Sequi was interesting in that it subjected various modernist techniques (rapid pizzicati, glissandi, percussive chords, nervous insect noises) to numerous repetitions punctuated by silence — lending some surface appeal to some pretty gangly material. But it wasn't clear to me that the repetitions served any purpose beyond this, or whether any process or progression of events was at work.

Pascal Dusapin's Quatuor No. 3, cast in four movements, struck me as music so smart it's dumb: impressive for its multi-layered densities, rapid shifts of differentiated color and chattering restlessness, but with seemingly little attention paid to carrying the listener's ear from point A to point B.

Too much of their good thing

In the end, if there is one problem I have with the Arditti Quartet it is certainly not their performing (which was stellar throughout), but their programming. There simply was not a single work on the entire program which did not contain just about every toy in the high modernist bag, whether it be shimmering harmonic, snap pizzicato, glissandi, the angular leap or the crunchy chord.

After you've heard your hundredth dissonant double stop played sul ponticello, the true urgency behind a work such as Rihm's quartet becomes seriously blunted and all the works on the program run the risk of sounding like blocks in a gray, undifferentiated wall. A little more variety in programming would help the gems to shine, the thorns to stab.

(Michael Fiday is a composer, currently residing in Oakland. His "Automotive Passacaglia" was performed last season by the Oakland East Bay Symphony, and he is currently at work on a song for New York's Sequitur Ensemble.)