Even a whole day of concerts – three programmes containing 15 works, three of them world premieres – was hardly enough to convey the full extent of the Arditti Quartet's achievement across four decades, and how the recent history of the form would have been very different without it. Of the original line-up only leader and founder Irvine Arditti remains, but as this 40th-anniversary retrospective demonstrated once again, the group's astonishing virtuosity and their willingness to extend the boundaries of what can be expected of a string quartet have never faltered.
The composers included in the celebration ranged in seniority from Elliott Carter (born in 1908) to Hèctor Parra (born 1976), and stylistically from the complexity of Brian Ferneyhough to the microtonally tinged neo-romanticism of Pascal Dusapin, all delivered with the same energy and sense of utter technical and musical assurance. Isolating highlights from so much isn't easy, but the frantic and fierce pair of pieces from Wolfgang Rihm's Fetzen, Ligeti's Second String Quartet (not written for the Ardittis but a work they've very much made their own) and, as a totally apt finale, Xenakis's torrential Tetras, still as explosively overwhelming as it was when they first performed it in 1983, were especially remarkable.
Two of the brand-new works were small-scale. James Clarke's String Quartet No 3 packs a huge amount of energy into its five-minute journey from frantic disorder to placid, clip-clopping pizzicatos, while Harrison Birtwistle's Hoquetus Irvineus is another tribute that stems from his fascination with Machaut. Hilda Paredes' Bitácora Capilar was more substantial. The title – "capillary log" in English translation – hints at its provenance: it's a record of a journey through the Ardittis' musical world, one that – as Irvine Arditti's wife - Paredes has observed at close quarters for many years. Naturally the writing fits the group like a glove, and the territory it traverses is constantly compelling, before coming to rest in a coda of ethereal harmonics.
