This reissue is part of Michael Nyman’s MN Records label
which has released over two dozen discs devoted to the composer’s
music. The three quartets were recorded back in 1990 by the
Balanescu Quartet on Argo and make a welcome appearance in this
gatefold-styled release, the second volume in the Nyman Chamber
Music sub-series.
The First Quartet was written in 1985 and moves deftly and brilliantly
through twelve brief sections. Nyman uses quotations from Schoenberg’s
Second Quartet and from the music of John Bull in a variation
flow of invention, with each section employing the name of each
composer, and Nyman’s own name, until Bull ‘meets’
Schoenberg in the penultimate section and Nyman rounds things
off. This clever work both scrutinises Bull, not least in his
popular vein, ensuring a continuum between his keyboard music
and Schoenberg’s epochal quartet. The ‘conflicting
sources’ thus generate a terrific work. The music is,
in performance, rather than theory, full of vitality and energising
currents, free flowing into and between time and space. Nyman
even courts Bull’s popular music and uses it to infiltrate
Unchained Melody, the ultimate pop song, into the John
Bull 5 section.
Three years later he wrote his Second Quartet which is rooted
in the music of dance. Its rhythmic basis is Indian music though
it doesn’t sound, and makes no attempt to sound, Indian.
Its shifting patterns sometimes sound a touch Reich-like, but
its contrasts and energy are reason enough to admire its infectious
drama. Movements three, a lovely song, and six, which is a typically
exciting Nymanesque one, are the most approachable and enjoyable.
The Third Quartet was written in 1990 and is a ‘transcription’
by the composer of his 1989 choral work Out of the Ruins,
which he wrote for a BBC TV documentary on the subject of the
December 1988 Armenian earthquake. This expressive canvas opens
slowly, and then speeds up before reaching a passionate intensity
that is both powerful and moving. It’s the most overtly
emotive of the three quartets, because its subject matter merits
the weight of expressive detail.
Like all the quartets it receives a reading of structural and
rhythmic lucidity and tonal breadth from the Balanescu Quartet,
whose first violinist Alexander Balanescu had originally suggested
turning the TV music into a string quartet.
Jonathan Woolf
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Balanescu Quartet 