Arditti String Quartet - Luciano Berio: The String Quartets (2002) [Re-Up]

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Arditti String Quartet - Luciano Berio: The String Quartets (2002) [Re-Up]

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This disc of Luciano Berio’s work for string quartet spans music written over the course of four decades, from the 1950s through the 1990s. And as fascinating, vigorous, and masterful as these compositions are, this Montaigne volume also serves as a useful counterpoint in exploring Berio’s instrumental output during periods in which his vocal music was attracting far more widespread attention. 1993’s reflective Notturno exemplifies the extraordinary power of the small, quiet gesture. Although more bold (even aggressive) moments do pop up from time to time, the players range through a series of hushed motions, marked in the score with indications such as “pppp quasi senza suono” (“almost without sound”) and “immobile e sospeso” (“motionless and suspended”). The result is altogether enchanting–a fine and entirely apt evocation of the quartet’s title. Sincronie, written between 1963-64, is a far more audaciously colored work; Berio’s interest in exploring the outer limits of string technique is more obvious here (though there are plenty of non-traditional techniques in Notturno as well). As the work’s name suggests, the imagining here is not of four discrete entities playing side by side, but rather of a single force. (The Arditti’s seamless delivery allows this construct to be entirely believable.) The latest piece, 1997’s Glosse, finds Berio at his most lyrical, beginning with a luxurious solo cello line framed by sharp pizzicatos. The effect is almost like hearing a vocalist singing in a crowd of clattering talkers. But it’s easily the most stringently structured work here, in which each rigidly separated section is built upon different forms, techniques, and moods. The Quartet No. 1, written in 1956, is very clearly of a certain time and place–a setting in which serialism and pointillism reign and the influence of Bruno Maderna and the Darmstadt school are quite clear. It would be hard to imagine an ensemble better suited to deliver this survey than the exemplary Arditti String Quartet; the group’s dedication to and understanding of this music, paired with the players’ technical mastery, would make this disc an easy top recommendation even if it weren’t the only complete survey of its kind. (This volume also happens to be the 38th in Naïve-Montaigne’s Arditti Quartet Edition.) The close, sharply delineated sound is top notch, too. [6/7/2003]

ClassicsToday.com

In many ways, the music Luciano Berio has composed for string quartet makes up a peripheral part of his output. The four works he has written so far do not define an evolutionary thread through his creative development in the way that, for instance, the quartets of Elliott Carter and Brian Ferneyhough do for those composers. In fact Berio did not compose anything for the medium for almost 30 years, between Sincronie, completed in 1964, and the Notturno, which he wrote in 1993. Those two substantial works (the Notturno plays for 25 minutes, Sincronie for 18) are framed chronologically by the two smaller pieces, the atypically prosaically titled Quartet No 1 from 1956, and the aphoristic Glosse of 1997.

The Arditti Quartet plays all of them as superbly as you would expect (only the Notturno is easily available on disc otherwise, performed by the Alban Berg Quartet on EMI) and show that even four such disconnected pieces do provide a map of sorts to the way in which Berio's musical preoccupations have shifted and mutated for the best part of half a century. Quartet No 1 was composed while he was still much influenced by Bruno Maderna, who had introduced the younger composer to the techniques of total serialism and the aesthetic of the Darmstadt school. It is a typical work of its time, pointillist in its colours and textures, fragmentary in gestures, though even in such an early piece there are anticipations of the mature composer, especially in the way he directs the listener's attention by the use of aural signposts to impose some kind of order on the teeming, apparently amorphous surfaces.

By the time of Sincronie, however, Berio had acquired a much clearer sense of how his music would be shaped and the grammar it would use. The structure is relatively easy to follow - a series of contrasting episodes with the hint of variation form behind them, capped by a distinct coda - and the gestures it contains are bolder, more obviously dramatic. It is music that has much in common with the series of Sequenzas for solo instruments that Berio had begun in the late 1950s, and like those pieces Sincronie pushes at the technical boundaries of what the four string instruments can do.

But the fascinating, beguiling Notturno very clearly belongs to another world again. Most of Berio's finest achievements belong to the decades that separate it from Sincronie - orchestral and choral masterpieces such as Sinfonia, Laborintus II and Coro, as well as three of the stage works - but the territory the quartet inhabits is utterly personal and far more private than those large-scale public statements. The title and the score's epigraph come from a poem by Paul Celan, and the music is a web of highly concentrated, evocative gestures, some of which barely emerge out of silence, while others attempt to be more fiercely assertive. Ideas do recur - a melody for the viola is one of the most persistent - but the impression left by the piece is one of mystery, as though what is heard is only part of what is there in the score.

Review by Andrew Clements, TheGuardian

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Arditti String Quartet - Luciano Berio: The String Quartets (2002) [Re-Up]

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