Some 15 years separate György Ligeti’s two numbered string quartets, and stylistically they belong to strikingly different phases of his creative career. The First, subtitled “Métamorphoses nocturnes”, was begun in 1953, when Ligeti was still living in his native Hungary, where socialist realism had been the rule for composers since the communist takeover five years earlier. By the time he came to write the Second he was based in western Europe, having left his native country during the uprising of 1956.
Heard in succession, the two quartets demonstrate where the mature works came from, and the newly minted musical world which they then inhabited – the Bartókian gestures of the 12 tiny movements of the First, already chafing against authoritarian stylistic prescriptions, are replaced in the Second by the shifting textures, interlocking mechanisms and harmonic sleights of hand with which Ligeti established his distinctive niche among the postwar avant garde. Sadly he never completed a quartet during the remarkable third period of his career, though after his death in 2006, sketches for two such works were found among his papers, apparently intended for the Arditti and Kronos Quartets respectively.
