Microludes - Gy÷rgy Kurtβg
Quartet No 3 - Pascal Dusapin
Inter Pares - Raymond Deane
Angel's Music - Bent S°rensen
Quartet No 2 - Gy÷rgy Ligeti
The Arditti Quartet's recital on Sunday was built around the premiere of Raymond Deane's Inter Pares, commissioned by Project to commemorate the first year of its new building.
What the programme offered was a survey of quartets spanning five decades. The earliest works, both by Hungarians, are also - and by a long distance - the best known. Ligeti's Second (1968) is already a classic in which, with remarkable richness of invention and expression, the composer brings the textural concerns of his earlier orchestral works to bear on the intimate world of the string quartet.
Kurtβg is perhaps the most celebrated miniaturist among living composers. The 12 short pieces of Microludes, a 1978 homage to his colleague Andrβs Mihβly, average less than a minute each, some amounting to just a single line of music. But they are extremely potent, and linger in the memory with a suggestiveness out of all proportion to their length.
The more recent works, Angel's Music (1988), by Denmark's Bent S°rensen, and the Third Quartet (1992) by Frenchman Pascal Dusapin, inhabit highly contrasted sound worlds, S°rensen's a crepuscular place of ethereally delicate flutters and slides (he relates the title to "countless playing angels on the top of frescoes and altarpieces" in Roman churches), Dusapin's ranging more widely and aggressively, with a less consistent sense of focus.
Deane's Inter Pares pits the players against each other in an imitative, anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better way. The idea unfolds with typically bold, blunt strokes, in a manner that brings to mind the sort of keyboard indulgences favoured by Alkan, the still rarely heard 19th-century French composer.
Alkan gloried in following the detail of unlikely and sometimes naive ideas to their inevitable conclusions. Deane has the ideas and, one suspects, the inclination. But he fights shy of the detail and the full distance.
The Ardittis played with the sharpness of gesture and sensitivity of style for which they are renowned, and were rewarded with cheers, whistles and foot-stomping at the end of the evening.
