Elliott Carter

Ursula Oppens

Arditti Quartet

Charles Ives, Conlon Nancarrow, and Elliott Carter may be radically different composers, but all three delight in polyrhythmic interplay. Polyrhythms clashed and whirred throughout Monday's concert by the Arditti Quartet and pianist Ursula Oppens at Herbst Theater. These brilliant musicians constructed their program so that each piece reflected new meaning on the others, and they performed all of it with both mathematical precision and free exuberance.

By setting two Elliott Carter pieces on the first half, the Arditti traced the trajectory of his metrical modulation procedure. The fifty year-old Cello Sonata, in which he first used this technique received a subdued and elegant performance from Arditti cellist Rohan de Saram and Oppens. The highlight of the program was the West Coast premiere of Carter's new Piano Quintet, written for the Arditti and Oppens and premiered just five days earlier at the Library of Congress. This piece shows the ninety-year-old composer at the height of his powers, employing those same polyrhythms with even greater flexibility.

In one continuous movement, the quintet immediately presents the piano and strings as distinct entities: Oppens plays sparse chords against the Arditti's discrete lyrical gestures, and the piece gains momentum as Oppens handles increasingly virtuosic bursts of activity spanning the entire keyboard, punctuated by sustained muted chords in the strings. Time grinds down to a near-halt, with intermittent frenetic explosions, until the music gathers energy and propels forward with accumulating rapid passagework, to end with a brief conversation between all five instruments.

Not only did Oppens and the Arditti members explicate Carter's metrical puzzles; they meticulously expressed every dynamic marking, every "p" as opposed to "pp," every staccato versus marcato, every phrasing notation no matter how miniscule. Oppens' part in particular calls for treacherous "hairpin" crescendos (sometimes in only one hand), and groups of seven or five notes to the rhythmnic unit peppered with sixteenth-note rests. The quartet's four lines move at four independent rates of speed, each projecting a unique character, and all of which shone through clearly. The juxtaposition of newer and older Carter works also brought to mind how these musicians have been advocating Carter's music for decades. They are masters of maintaining his music's independent voices while converging as an ensemble.

Nancarrow's Studies for Player Piano far outnumber his compositions for human performers. Oppens played his 1988 Two Canons for Ursula with particular fluency, as if to prove that the human element adds profoundly to Nancarrow's otherwise mechanical music. How she manages to keep one hand seven-fifths the speed of the other is a mystery. Nancarrow's String Quartet No. 3, composed for the Arditti also in 1988, conjures up a comical Rube Goldberg-like four-part contraption on the verge of collapse. Its humor belies its complexity: the musicians made child's play of the precisely colliding meters, while creating a cohesive statement out of disjointed pizzicato harmonics and muted glissandi.

Hearing Ives' Five Pieces for Piano and String Quartet and his Scherzo, "Holding Your Own," in the context of Carter and Nancarrow sheds substantial light on these early experiments in polyrhythmic procedures. The third piece in particular, brought the other two composers to mind, as Ives compresses two concurrent events, each in its own tonality and rhythm, and seems to rejoice in the resultant discord. The Five Pieces concluded this inspired program by musicians who invested 85-year-old works with spontaneity and vigor, and performed brand-new pieces as if they'd studied them for years.

(Sarah Cahill is a pianist and a music critic for the Express, and hosts a music show on KPFA (94.1 FM) every Friday from 10 am to noon.)

©1998 Sarah Cahill, all rights reserved