For a contemporary
composer, having one’s work played/recorded by the Arditti Quartet
is tantamount to a kind of endorsement of its merits, the granting
of kind of imprimatur from the group perfectly justifiably described,
in the Guardian in April 2005, as “the
world's pre-eminent contemporary music quartet”. The quartets
to be heard on this well recorded CD make it clear that the
work of Adrian Jack deserves such an accolade.
Played in chronological order of composition, the quartets (and quartet
movement) recorded here span the years from 1996 to 2002.
The Third Quartet, in four movements, the third and fourth played without
a break, states its governing structures pretty clearly, its
musical patterns being readily discernable for the most part.
The music of this quartet is perhaps more emotionally open,
less ambiguous or veiled, than that of the later compositions.
The two-movement finale is particularly striking, beginning
with a long, hushed section, full of a kind of delicate tension,
its stillness pregnant with the possibility, or rather the certainty,
of something very different. Sure enough, the second phase of
the finale, the fourth movement of the quartet, marked “very
vigorous and with abandon”, erupts into passionate and forceful
writing; but its “abandon” is not so great as to preclude a
very clear reiteration of one of the dominant motifs from the
first movement. The sense of closure thus achieved and affirmed
effects a resolution of many of the quartet’s tensions.
The relatively extrovert emotional rhetoric of this Third Quartet is largely
absent from the Fourth Quartet. Jack himself, in the booklet
notes to this CD, describes this quartet as “perhaps, my most
inward and meditative quartet”. The quartet is in three movements,
in the first of which the Arditti articulate perfectly the composer’s
characterisation of it as “secretive and mysterious”; the rhythmic
vitality of the writing ensures that the ‘mystery’ never becomes
merely self-indulgent. The second, slower movement is far more
relaxed and exudes a degree quasi-nostalgic wistfulness, even
melancholy, a sense of a mind easing into itself, a turning
inwards rather than an engagement with its immediate surroundings
or the issues they raise. The final movement renews the rhythmic
impetus and with it the sense of an engagement with the world
beyond the self – though not without recurrent moments of meditative
withdrawal. The closure-avoiding tentativeness of the final
bars, the resistance to the kind of closure so neatly effected
in the earlier quartet, constitutes in the terms of the quartet’s
musical idioms, a refusal – or an inability – to make the choice
between what the renaissance called, on the one hand, the Active
Life and, on the other, the Contemplative Life. It makes for
a touching conclusion, private yet of larger significance.
In a single movement, 08.02.01 takes its title from the
date of its first performance, when it was performed by the
Arditti, along with the third and fourth quartets, at a concert
in St. John’s, Smith Square. The date also happened to be that
of Irvine Arditti’s birthday. The piece has an uneasy intensity,
a sense of anxiety and tension which is left unresolved in a
way which builds up an expectation of further developments,
of further movements, but comes to an ending, in which nothing
is ended, without such things happening.
The Fifth Quartet
is, again, in three movements. The first starts off with a reassuring
sense of certainty and purposefulness, persuading us that this
music knows precisely where it is going. But doubts arise, questioning
interjections are insistently made. There is something of the
same innerness of gaze which characterises the Fourth Quartet,
and in the central movement certainties seem largely to have
disappeared; we are in a mental world of scurrying motifs, where
it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to distinguish the stable
from the fugitive. This is an evanescent world, where ideas
and impressions are too flickering, too quickly formed and unformed,
for one to be able to put one’s trust in them. There is more
confidence, more that can be depended on, in the “flowing and
vigorous” (Jack’s marking) third movement; now there is a more
affirmative note, a greater sense of a world in which the self
can be sure of its own existence and significance – though such
confidence remains qualified and tentative. Jack’s is not a
music in which arrogance, complacency or the sense of a trial
triumphantly overcome have a place.
Of the Sixth Quartet
Jack tells us that when he began it he “felt it was going to
be too light to call a quartet, though it turned out to be just
as serious as its predecessors”. But, as Jack goes on to observe,
it still seems apt to subtitle it a ‘serenade’ because “it is
rather like a collection of character or genre pieces”. The
five movements have titles: Aubade – Berceuse – Scherzo – Retrospect
– Prospect. The opening Aubade is very much a dawn chorus, full
of the conversation of birds against a slowly developing, slowly
awakening, accompaniment in the bass. This is a quite beautiful
movement, rich in a sense of anticipation, but also mindful
of the night just ended. The Berceuse is rather more ominous
than one expects from such a piece, its calmness thoroughly
troubled, the reassurance it offers only very partial. The central
scherzo offers a brief point of more extrovert energy, before
Retrospect – marked “very slow: calm and hypnotic” – reminds
us of the Berceuse. If the fourth movement ‘rhymes’ with the
second, so, in a sense does the fifth rhyme with the first.
The birds of the Aubade are replaced, in the Fifth, by music
which has the fluidity of moving water; the opening skies of
dawn are those under which a Prospect (as much spatial as temporal)
is explored.
All of these quartets
have their rewards to offer. This is intelligent, concise, searching
music and it gets performances of high artistry and commitment.
It is hard, indeed, to imagine better or more sympathetic performances.
Glyn Pursglove
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