This is the second
volume in Naxos’s Gloria Coates Quartet
series [Vol
1] and once again the frighteningly
accomplished Kreutzer Quartet do the
honours. Suffused in tone clusters and
constant glissandi and often bewildering
sonorities these are works, as are her
Symphonies, that will enthral or repel.
If one takes the works in the order
in which they’re presented one starts
with the Seventh, subtitled Angels
and written for the apparently unique
combination of string quartet and organ.
The organ part is indeed eerie in the
extreme and the tone clusters and embedded
hymnal quotations add an Ivesian slant
to the texture – though obviously the
language as such is uncompromisingly
contemporary. One senses in the music
a huge organism in inexorable motion
and from 8.30 something cataclysmic
happens leading to the remarkable sounds,
almost, of engines whirring. This piece
was first performed a few weeks after
the September 11th attacks and it has
something of a threnody about it, though
too abstract for such simplistic nomenclature.
The Second Quartet
lasts a bare six or so minutes.
There are constant glissandi here for
the lower strings sounding for all the
world like the constant creaking open
and shut of a badly oiled door. Amidst
the tumult a childhood composition of
Coates’s slowly appears, a moment of
innocence and radiance, surrounded by
stern unison and frantic, well, slither.
No. 8 (2001-2002) is in three
short movements and written in memory
of the victims of the September 11th.
The first movement is a meditative and
dynamically shifting canon, the second
("In falling timbers buried")
seething with glissandi and the third
is called Prayer. The Fourth Quartet
exploits tremolandi and frantic
drone writing, alluding to folk elements
and in the final movement approaches,
after pungent and quite motoric drive,
a degree at least of lyricism. The Third
Quartet of 1975 evinces that omnipresent
Coates sound world of ostinati and obsessive
glissandi. The first movement is crepuscular
in part with a – descriptive phrases
like this can be laughable but this
one isn’t – police siren motif and is
full of insinuating and cumulatively
tense music, laced with pizzicati and
wailing. The finale is abrasive and
coarse with – critical colours hammered
to the mast for once – unpleasant skittering
mosquito music.
I know that Coates’
idiosyncratic sound world will appeal
to many; others will find it forbidding.
I certainly admire the performances
and the ambition and it’s perhaps a
tribute to Coates’ single-minded concentration
and sense of artistic purpose that I
found so much of it so unattractive.
Jonathan Woolf
see also review
by Michael Cookson
Kreutzer Quartet 