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.
Nevertheless what we do have are two of the most significant contributions to the quartet repertory from the second half of the 20th century. They make enormous technical and musical demands, and the performances by the Quatuor Diotima meet their challenges with more accuracy and brilliance than any I’ve heard before. Every detail of the string writing, all informed by Ligeti’s phenomenal aural imagination, is crystal clear, the shape of each movement utterly lucid. And between these works the Diotima provide a glimpse of where Ligeti’s musical journey began; if the First Quartet belongs to what the composer called his “prehistoric” period, then the Andante and Allegretto, composed in 1950 while he was a student at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, presumably qualifies as primordial Ligeti, when Kodály was part of the stylistic mix as well as Bartók, and the influence of Hungarian and Romanian folk music was still clear.
This week’s other pick
There’s much more of both the primordial and prehistoric Ligeti on SWR Classics’ survey of his Complete Works for a cappella Choir, sung with great poise and precision by the SWR Vokalensemble, conducted by Yuval Weinberg. The first of the discs and much of the second are taken up with settings from the 1940s and early 50s, a number recorded for the first time. The first of the mature pieces is the statically beautiful Lux Aeterna, written as a codicil to the Requiem of the 1960s, while the Hungarian Études after Poems by Sándor Weöres, and the Three Fantasies after Friedrich Hölderlin date from the 1980s, both as entrancingly beautiful as they are technically intricate.
