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BIS4
It’s 30 years since I heard Gyorgy Ligeti explain why he was allowing his first string quartet to be performed after four decades lying in a drawer. The quartet, composed in 1954, was too close to its sources. “It’s Bartok’s seventh,’ said Ligeti, ‘But I’ve now realised that’s not such a bad thing.”
Titled Metamorphoses nocturnes, the quartet has buzzing insects, whispering grasses and many things that go bump in the night. In amidst the feral noises there are wistful lines of melody and a macabre sense of humour, blacker by far than Bartok’s Bluebeard. Every now and then, a Haydn chord is heard. Think of it as a bridge between pre- and post-war modernism, written under the heavy hand of Hungarian state communism. Two years later, Ligeti fled west.
His second quartet, dated 1968, is likewise transitional. Written in a revolutionary year, it opens with an Allegro nervosa in which the composer departs from Boulez-Stockhausen serialism into a frank and brutal encounter with real-world music that people might want to hear. As ever in Ligeti, there is waspish wit, nasty moments and episodes of transcendental calm and delicacy. Ligeti is the least predictable of composers, the most satisfying to a questing mind, the perfect antidote to end-of-year mush.
Between the two Ligetis, the Marmen Quartet deliver Bartok’s fourth string quartet of 1928, Mozartian by comparison with its neighbours. The hour-long album is lustily and lyrically played by four Europeans who met in 2013 at the Royal College of Music, before London became too Brexity difficult for continentals to complete their studies. The Marmens, forged in a different age, remind us of much that has been lost, not least a reasonable opportunity to explore Ligeti’s bumpetty world, out there at the edge of the known universe.
