quartet-lab, Wigmore Hall, London - review

Δημοσιεύθηκε: 22 Οκτωβρίου 2014 - 14:57

The name quartet-lab was chosen to make a point. If four musicians see themselves as bringing the hidebound string quartet recital into the 21st century, a science laboratory is not a bad metaphor. Mix the chemicals, set off the explosion, and see what the world of chamber music looks like when the dust has settled.

The four players of quartet-lab - Pekka Kuusisto and Patricia Kopatchinskaja violins, Lilli Maijala viola and Pieter Wispelwey cello - are noted soloists in their own right. The quartet includes some strong personalities and its programmes are designed to show off how far it is prepared to go to be different.

Although the first half of Tuesday's recital looked old-fashioned, it was anything but standard. Biber's Battalia, played in an arrangement for four strings, is already a wild musical depiction of a 17th-century battle, but it was broken up here with mournful, meditative solos by Britten, Cage and Ligeti. The Musical Dice Game attributed to Mozart invited audience participation, as the people sitting in the front row assembled a new minuet.

Then came Beethoven's String Quartet Op.18 No.4, ostensibly played straight, but in a wildly modernist style that involved extreme speeds, slashing accents and a quite unpleasantly harsh sound. This was Beethoven hot from the scientists' hands, as if he had gone several spins on the Large Hadron Collider and come back with his molecules rearranged.

The second half advanced to the 20th century. John Cage's Living Room Music is one of his everyday pieces, designed to be played on whatever came to hand at home, in this case objects from the living room (books, floor, windowsill etc). The Wigmore is a suitably homely place to hear it and quartet-lab nicely acted out a quiet evening in a suburban semi.

The main work, George Crumb's Black Angels from 1970, has become a modern classic. Well amplified, quartet-lab was vivid in the eerie, satanic sound pictures it creates out of whispered harmonics and crystal glasses, though the Kronos Quartet (last heard in Black Angelsat the Hackney Empire two years ago) still owns this piece, not least thanks to its atmospheric staging. Enquiring minds, promising formula, unpredictable results in the lab.

wigmore-hall.org.uk

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