Irvine Arditti 60th birthday Wigmore Hall

Irvine Arditti celebrated his 60th birthday at the Wigmore Hall. Contemporary music would be nowhere without Arditti and his Quartet (past and present). For nearly 40 years, he's helped shape new music. He can play at such a technically challenging level that works can be created that might otherwise exist only in a composer's dreams.  In turn, he inspires new work written specially for him. Indeed, the Arditti Quartet can be credited with creating modern string quartet repertoire. But he's modest. For his big birthday, he's chosen pieces he's played many times, and enjoys: just right for a celebration among friends. Perhaps that's his secret: he loves what he plays and communicates his enthusiasm to those who listen

Arditti began with Brian Ferneyhough, with whom he has been so closely identified for decades. Not one of the astonishingly inventive Ferneyhough string quartets but one of the composer's early pieces, Intermedio alla ciaconna for solo violin.(1986). Ferneyhough is one of those rare composers who can talk music in his own inimitable way. "Intermedio", says Ferneyhough, "is based exclusively on a series of eight chords, capable of static (symmetrical)  or mobile (asymetrical) modes of extension"   What I heard was Arditti playing impossibly long unbroken lines which seemed to glitter with myriad, frantic detail. "Fictional polyphony" adds Ferneyhough, a way of using a solo instrument to suggest "secondary parametric levels of organization".

No-one really competes with Ferneyhough, so Robert H P Platz's strings (Echo VII, 2008)  seemed sedate in comparison. Hearing members of a quartet playing in different parts of a performance space is nothing new but livened up proceedings. Hilda Paredes's Cuerdas del destino (2007-8) was lively: lots of ideas jostling for attention. Perfect for the occasion.

Altogether more demanding - and more satisfying - was Francisco Guerrero Marin's Zayin I and II for string trio 1983 and 1989) part of a cycle of seven movements. Like Ferneyhough, Guerrero Marin was fascinated by complex organic forms. Zayin I exploded with vibrant energy. Sounds shattered and multiplied. Crack! Crack! sang the instruments, a lot of wood and playing close to the neck of instruments. The score must be black and crackling with densely written notation.  So many sounds in the smallest possible time. Very earthy: I visualized ferns springing out of the soil, in slow motion then speeded up, their fronds unfurling in myriad replicas of their basic structure. Ferns or fractals? Ferns seem fragile but their fronds unfold with powerful energy. there were ferns before man entered the world... Zayin II felt more unified, the instruments buzzing like a hive of bees, contained within the restraint of an enclosed structure, itself a creation of endless repeated smaller cells. When I'm tired, my mind translates sounds into colours. Zayin I and II were almost sensory overload. But how I enjoyed it! When I got home, I ordered the CD.

And then, John Cage, Eight Whiskus for solo violin (1985) Perhaps Whiskus is another adventure linked to numerology and patterns, like Zayin and so much of Ferneyhough, but I loved its quirky wit. Tiny, elusive epigrams which sound oddly like a folk tune plucked on a banjo by a fiendishly virtuosic banjo-player. If the composer had jumped on stage it would have been so typical of his sense of humour.

Akira Nishimura and Irvine Arditti are old friends. Like so many pieces before and to come, Nishimura's String Quartet no 5 Shesha  (2013) was written specifically for Arditti. "Shesha" is a snake, and both composers were born in the Year of the Snake. The piece is a  "celebratory small ring carved of sound in the shape of a snake" said the composer. For me it worked in purely abstract terms, leaping and slithering rapidly: long, slippery legato that tests and taunts Arditti's characteristic technique, playing to his strengths.  Who thinks new music can't be fun ?

Wolfgang Rihm - et lux et al

Wolfgang Rihm's Et Lux had its UK premiere last weekend at Huddersfield ( for more on the Huddersfield Festival which continues this week please see HERE) It's different because it brings together the Arditti Quartet, who do ultra modern, and the Hilliard Ensemble, who sing early music. Rihm has experimented with odd combinations before, like his refiguring of Bach, but this is quite new.

Ivan Hewett was there. Here's what he said "After a wispy single-line introduction from the quartet came a pure euphonious vocal chord. It was light but shadowy, a stunning moment of "darkness visible".......Often, the music tipped towards harsh dissonance, though always in a soft voice.....someimes, the quartet seemed to fight the voices with plucked and scrubbed sounds, sometimes it was like a second four-part choir." Read the full review HERE.

Looking ahead, there's a Wolfgang Rihm Total Immersion at the Barbican in London in March. See HERE for details. Wow ! Lots of previously unheard work and Rihm will be there himself to talk to.

Simon Bainbridge, Rebecca Saunders : music as sculpture

The joy of being in cities like London is that there's so much on, you're spoiled for choice. Last Saturday alone there were 6 different good things on offer. The one I wish I'd been at was the Wigmore Hall where the Arditti Quartet and the Hilliard Ensemble played several new works, including Simon Bainbridge's Tenebrae.

This is what the Times, said, "a tough but atmospheric work that appeared to take its cue from the English title — Shadows — of the Paul Celan poem it set. Certainly the use of silence, and of strings to cushion the gentle, overlapping chanting of the voices on eerie chords, seemed to suggest an “otherworld” shadowing the human. I just wished that the voices had something more interesting to do. All the extrovert break-outs came from the strings." The Times is not the place to go to read about new music but at least that helps a bit. I wish I'd been there! Bainbridge is one of the most original current British composers, quite different from the "religious" crowd like Finnissy, MacMillan, Harvey, Tavener.

Bainbridge previously set Primo Levi, extremely well, in Ad Ora Incerta and Four Primo Levi Settngs, so Paul Celan should follow naturally. Indeed, I've always thought of Bainbridge in terms of Paul Celan, so I'm kicking myself for missing this. Last night I was listening to the recording, about which I'll write more later.

Magnus Lindberg said “music is making notes vibrate in space”. There’s also the often-quoted phrase describing architecture as “frozen music”. Hence, Simon Bainbridge’s Music Space Reflection addresses itself to Daniel Liebeskind’s innovative building for the Imperial War Museum North. The music was created to be heard in that building, the audience encouraged to look up and around them, even to move around to appreciate how movement adapted what they heard. The idea, I think, is that the listener can process sound in relation to space, and respond to surroundings in a musical way. I heard it in the flat, conventional auditorium at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, which almost certainly limited the experience. There were wide screen projections of images like glass and metal – nothing more explicit – but these were distracting rather than helpful.

The orchestra played in four equally balanced blocks across the platform, amplified sensitively by microphones and speakers in unusual formations, such as above and behind the audience. The resonances were quite bizarre, genuinely imparting a sense that sound was coming from four dimensions, and adding a low, rumble giving a depth of sound not otherwise possible from conventional instruments. It felt as though we were hearing the very pulse of the earth.

The music unfolds against a deep electronic deep reverberation, moving swiftly in different directions, sometimes creating angular dissonances, sometimes rotating in whimsical flurries. Sometimes the sounds turn on a sudden pivot, changing direction as if they were rounding corners. You don’t need visual clues, but you can “feel” glass and metal in the clear, sharp textures, solid forms against transparent. This is very expressive music, though not at all “programmatic”: it’s far too imaginative and quirky. Just as architecture is a means of giving shape to “empty” space, even silence is part of Bainbridge’s concept. At the end, sounds gradually dissipate, but even then, there’s a structure to the way they fade into the computer-enhanced hum, so understated that only sensitive ears can pick it up. In nature, too, there are many sounds almost imperceptible to human ears, but they are there, nonetheless, and affect us subliminally.

Driving home I listened to BBC Radio 3's Hear and Now programme on the Berlin Avant Garde. Quite interesting speakers though I'm not sure about the music. One piece reminded me of many hours spent in an intensive care unit praying the machines didn't deviate from relentless hum because of what that might mean. But forward it to 22 minutes, when Rebecca Saunders comes on. Blauuw, written for the trumpeter Marco Blauuw is a wonderful piece, so listen before it goes off air on 14th.

Music is invisible, but it's created by sound waves and vibrations which are physical phenomena, and affected by where they are made. Saunders's music is extremely physical. She uses sound like probes, exploring the space around it: sound waves expand or retract differently in different environments, subtly adapting to the space in which they are heard. At the Proms in 2009, her Traces was performed. Read about it HERE If you think in conventional thematic development, it seems formless, til you realize that what's she's doing is using music to "feel" a way around ideas, like a blind person might use their fingers to explore what they can't see. It's a whole new way of thinking about music, extremely sensual and physical but in a subtle way that grows out of space rather than existing in limbo. Rebecca Saunders sculpts with sound, the way a sculptor might shape a piece of marble, following the natural form inherent in the stone.

THIS is where I went Saturday night - Britten Sinfonia at the QRH. I went because the programme was very well chosen, designed to showcase Elliott Carter's Dialogues, from 2005, an important work that has been recorded 3 times already as far as I know. It's a very important work in the vast Carter canon, and needs to be known by anyone wanting to understand Carter's work. Performance was good enough, but the last time I heard this live it was conducted by Pierre Boulez, Carter's friend for over 50 years, who's one of the best Carter interpreters of all. The Britten Sinfonia is a good orchestra, but the booklet presentation could have been better.

Nono La Lontananza Arditti

Fragments of Venice (4) : Nono, La Lontananza nostalgica utopia futura Irvine Arditti (violin), André Richard (sound projection) Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, 31.10.2007(AO)


La Lontananza is in many ways the quintessential expression of Nono’s brilliance. It’s more than “just” music, it’s a conceptual innovation which makes us rethink the very nature of music. For Luigi Nono, music grew from life, and enhanced life and similarly art didn’t need to be confined to any specific conventions. Form was just a “construct” to help frame ideas conveniently because the spirit of art lies beyond that, free and limitless as the creative impulse. Too much is often made of Nono’s “political” work, which so many of his contemporaries, like Henze and Berio also pursued but his real genius lies in pieces like this, which stretch the very spirit of art.

The South Bank Nono series wasn’t subtitled “Fragments of Venice” for nothing. Entire programmes were devoted to Monteverdi and the baroque masters for a very good reason. As a young man, Nono spent a lot of time in the many churches in Venice, staying for hours in their cool interiors. This was a completely different world from the hot, noisy streets outside with their endless bustle where Nono would have heard music performed with reverence, and in an atmosphere conducive to inner reflection. He learned things like polyphony, freedom of expression within ensemble, and the subservience of elements like text to overall meaning. More fundamentally, what he absorbed was the idea that music isn’t a fixed, rigid commodity but a human experience that draws from many sources, and has more possibilities than we can imagine. It’s no surprise then, that so many cutting edge composers today, like Ferneyhough, draw inspiration from the baroque, just as Nono did.

La Lontananza is performed in darkness, as if in an ancient, unlit and unheated church. This stills the mind, the better that we can focus on contemplation, free of external distractions. The first sounds we hear come from behind a screen, “masked” as it were – another aspect of the intriguing ambiguity that is so much part of the magic of Venice. It is only when Irvine Arditti quietly materialises at the side of the screen that you realise that the violin you’re hearing exists not in “reality” but on a recording, forcing the listener to ask, 'What is reality ? What is illusion ? ' and ' Why ? ' which is even more pertinent.

In a church, what you hear is literally shaped by space. In the nave, you’ll hear certain resonances not quite so clear in the wings. Even the height of the roof impacts on the way things sound. Yet all are part of the whole experience. Thus Nono has the violinist moving from place to place in the auditorium. Processions, and movement, are part of music in many cultures, not just in Christianity, but something we’ve lost in the fixed-platform approach that has dominated western music for the last 300 years. Thus Arditti makes a progress round the hall, playing at different stands. At first it seems to matter “where” he’s playing, but as the music unfolds, that focus no longer seems important. What impresses more is the seamless, surround sound quality of the experience. Gradually it no longer matters what is being played live and what’s recorded, for the human violinist blends with the electronic version of himself on tape with such seamlessness that reality itself blurs once more. Again, we have the image of Venice, half built on water, half on land, and of horizons where sea blends into sky.

La Lontananza has a sub title, “madrigale per più ‘caminantes’ con Gideon Kremer”. The different positions that Arditti plays in aren’t just for acoustic completeness, but reflect subtle progressions in the music itself. For Nono, the idea of movement, of “travelling” is fundamental. His music “goes somewhere” and is open ended. The theme of journeying recurs in works like Hay no caminar which itself exists in two versions, one growing out of the other. That title refers to an inscription Nono spotted in an old building. “Caminantes, no hay caminos, hay que caminar”. It means “Travellers, there are no roads, but we travel on.” The South Bank series wisely presented Hay no Caminar twice, first in its semi-orchestral version with the London Sinfonietta, and then in the version for two violins, before which Arditti led a masterclass. Arditti had studied the piece with Nono himself, so his insights were fascinating. He explained the significance of minute details so lucidly that even non-string players could appreciate what he meant.

This fascination with journeys connects to something quite fundamental in Nono’s music. He’s an explorer, seeking new direction and means of expression. The “journeying” also fills a spiritual purpose. Nowadays, we expect so much instant-access expertise, however superficial, that it’s easy to forget that in many cultures, the path to wisdom is through humble learning and experience. La Lontananza is a pilgrimage towards some undefined goal, a kind of atheist Stations of the Cross. Its quiet but firm traverse is a kind of meditation, making us listen patiently and examine why.

A friend who did a lot of the theoretical maths that’s behind modern sound technology used to say that our ideas of “mono” and “stereo” were hopelessly primitive, because sound is ambient, coming at us from all sources, and at all levels. It’s our brains that filter and process what we “hear” whatever the sound sources. It’s not surface 'noise' that makes music, but something altogether more elusive. Everything goes into the experience. Thus, if during this performance, we heard the sounds of workmen outside the auditorium, and coughs from the audience, it wasn’t a problem because this music functioned on many levels. Remember Nono, sitting in a church while a different world revolved around outside.

Each performance of this work is unique as it’s shaped by the spatial and acoustic properties of wherever it’s played. A church is a purpose-built “performance space” because its design and ornamentation extend the impact of the music. Even the cruciform shape is symbolic. The Latin Mass could be like total theatre, conveying meaning in many levels, so even if the actual words were in an alien language, the impact still came through. Architecture shapes sound. In a church, high vaulted ceilings make sound echo, and what you hear in the wings is different from what you hear in the nave. Yet it’s all part of the same “whole”, whatever the angle from which it’s heard. Nono’s use of the entire performance space thus breaks rigid boundaries of sound projection and creates a more flexible approach to what music can be. His use of recorded sound and snatches of mechanical sound or taped noises also expands the panorama of what we hear beyond the confines of “formal” music. Sound projection becomes an art form in its own right. André Richard, who has performed this piece since its inception, knows how to gauge a venue and its acoustic, and operates his instrument like a chamber player, sensitive to what’s happening around him and to his partner, the live soloist. The possibilities of creating music in space are still being explored: just this year, Simon Bainbridge premiered two pieces on this theme, Music Sound Reflection and Diptych, which incidentally was inspired by Venice.

Arditti’s violin is clearly venerable, for its tone is lusciously rich and resonant – even with a broken string. It would sound exquisite in any music, yet here he manages to coax beautiful new sounds which its maker might not have imagined. Here we heard Arditti, in music that’s still state of the art, yet his instrument would have been played by many other great virtuosos in their time and hopefully, it will serve other musicians in centuries to come. The performance juxtaposed past, present and future. Once again, the world of the baroque connects to the modern, in parallel just as in Venice, traces of the past co-exist with the present.

For Nono, history was important and he was immensely proud of what Venice had achieved. By humbly learning from its traditions, he could continue to build on them, in his own way : there is so much in La Lontananza that rewards patient “pilgrimage” into its many depths.

Anne Ozorio