It is impossible to overstate the impact of the Arditti Quartet on the development of contemporary chamber music. They have premiered hundreds of works by the masters of musical modernism; at the Snape Maltings Concert Hall, they demonstrated their unique authority in three recent works written especially for them.
The latest addition to the Arditti canon is Thomas Adès's Piano Quintet, which received its British premiere with Adès himself playing the piano part. It is the longest span of instrumental music he has yet written: a single 20-minute movement founded on archetypal musical structures. In outline, the piece corresponds to the plan of many classical and romantic first movements: there is a repeated exposition of material, which is then developed and reprised in the work's final section. Yet this design is not used with neoclassical irony. Instead, the Ardittis' powerful performance generated an irresistible musical momentum.
What is surprising about the piece is the immediacy of its melodies. But this directness is offset by the way they are treated. Using all of the Ardittis' powers of rhythmic coordination, the tunes continually slide into different time-signatures and slip from one instrument to another. The music is elusive and never stable, and creates a parallel universe in which everything, even time itself, is relative.
Yet for all this fluid unpredictability, the structure is precisely controlled. In the final section, the events of the exposition are compressed into a fraction of the time they occupied at the start of the piece. In Adès and the Ardittis' performance, the music hurtled towards a huge climax, and created an unmistakable sense of arrival. It was a moment that clinched the tonal and temporal trajectories of the piece.
Conlon Nancarrow's Third String Quartet is another work that investigates musical time. In each of three movements, a single line is played simultaneously at different speeds by the four players. The Ardittis were again equal to the fiendish challenges of the music, but they also found lightness and delicacy in Nancarrow's intricate melodies. At the opposite end of the expressive spectrum, Iannis Xenakis's Tetras created a violent drama of vivid string sonority.
On Saturday Irvine Arditti, the founder of the quartet, presented a solo recital in the Jubilee Hall, and gave the British premiere of the revised version of George Benjamin's Three Miniatures. In a programme that included music of frantic energy by Xenakis and Brian Ferneyhough, Benjamin's pieces were beautifully constructed essays in restraint.
