Recitals by the Arditti Quartet seem to have become pleasingly regular at the Wigmore Hall. The group’s latest appearance there was a typical mix of 20th-century classics – Luciano Berio’s Sincronie and Morton Feldman’s Structures – alongside two pieces composed especially for the group. In Verästelten Gedanken, by the Swiss composer Michael Jarrell, was receiving its first British performance, while Harrison Birtwistle’s The Silk House Sequences was getting its world debut.
For all its careful exploitation of the vast range of effects that the Ardittis have at their fingertips, Jarrell’s piece, the latest in a series called Nachlese (Gleanings), emerged as disappointingly ordinary, with a conventional four-movement form filled with ideas that seem more about fuelling musical processes than generating anything memorable or expressive. Birtwistle’s 25-minute single movement doesn’t break genuinely new ground, either, but returns to one of his long-established principles, that of meshing and layered musical clockworks (the sequences of the title) that generate a large-scale form of tremendous energy. The layers sometimes resolve into melody and accompaniment, and sometimes break off for moments of intense solo lyricism before the giant mechanism comes to an almost arbitrary halt.
The following evening, the Nash Ensemble’s concert centred on the Wigmore’s current composer-residency. Julian Anderson had devised the programme, which, as well as works by Stravinsky and Ravel and the London premiere of John Woolrich’s feisty and effective piano quintet Pluck from the Air, included the first performance of Anderson’s Wigmore commission, together with three of his rarely heard early pieces.
The most intriguing of those dates from 1987, when Anderson was 20. Ring Dance is a fierce, unrelenting piece for two violins (played with tremendous energy by Laura Samuel and David Adams) that harks back to the Norwegian folk tradition of the Hardanger fiddle, yet reveals Anderson’s affiliations with the French spectralist composers. Anderson describes it as a prototype for everything he’s composed since.
Even in the new work, Van Gogh/Blue, a series of short, beautifully crafted instrumental movements inspired by the painter’s canvases and letters for an ensemble in which the two clarinets move around the auditorium, that collision between the familiar and the intellectually rigorous is never far from the immaculate surfaces. Musical shapes that seem clear and neoclassical suddenly come up against microtonal harmonies that are neither. In the end, perhaps, whether that seems disconcerting or teasingly original comes down to personal taste.
- This article was amended on 12 November 2015 with a new photograph. Its initial image featured players no longer in the Arditti lineup.
