LONG LIVE LIGETI!
posted by James Reel
Gyorgy Ligeti wrote his String Quartet No. 1 just over half a century ago, but somehow I’d never heard it until last night’s Arizona Friends of Chamber Music concert by the Artemis Quartet. What spectacular music! I was predisposed to like it, because I’m enthusiastic about Bela Bartók’s quartets, and Bartók was a heavy influence on Ligeti at this early stage of the latter’s career. Even so, you can hear in this quartet hints of the composer Ligeti would become once he fled Hungary, particularly in its exploration of unusual timbres, like the spooky glissandi underlying muted solos near the end.
It’s intense music with moments of whimsy, and it got a precise and harrowing performance by the Artemis Quartet. The few slips I noticed were trivial. The cellist, for example, during a long passage that repeated a rhythmic pattern punctuated by the so-called “Bartók pizzicato,” where the string is plucked so hard that it snaps back against the fingerboard, missed one pizz near the end. Big deal. Why do I bring it up? Simply to show how I’d have to dig deep into the performance to find something to complain about; all the really tough stuff—and there are lots of challenges here in terms of timing and ensemble—came off spectacularly well. The group even brought a rock’n’roll rawness and force to a couple of the folk-dance rhythms toward the end. Like, wow, man, it’s psychedelic: the Gyorgy Ligeti Experience.
I have to admit that I was not as impressed by the rest of the concert as I’d hoped, after hearing the Artemis Quartet’s gripping new Beethoven recording for EMI. The tone in the opening Mozart “Prussian” Quartet was a bit thin for my current taste, but it was a perfectly acceptable performance. Similarly, the reading of the Schubert A-minor quartet had much to commend it, but for the most part I missed that sense of singing line that Earl Carlyss, formerly with the Juilliard Quartet, stressed was so essential to Schubert when I interviewed him on the subject a few weeks ago. Perhaps my expectations were unrealistic. But the Ligeti—the composition and the performance—made the evening overall a tremendous success.
