Search - Maderna, Arditti String Quartet :: For Strings

Wonderful lyricism,impassioned Arditti gritty-like playing

scarecrow | Chicago, Illinois United States | 08/01/2000

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Bruno Maderna died at a relatively early age in the middle Seventies,he was a man quite respected who loved life,mirth and merriment,and this intensity was also an integral part of his music,as conductor and composer. He was not prolific, yet his music profoundly touched the primary issues of this century. His string music is a direct reflection of that, the early post Webern "Quartet" from 1955, a time when the new musical language of serialism was being created. This is a powerful quartet with extended sonorities, ferocious tutti gestures, dissonant double stops, Bartok pizz,tremoli, all this is framed in a structural fragmentation where musical ideas quickly change from brutal attachs to reverent heavenly lyrical harmonics. Maderna was not afraid of extremes and you feel this here,yet part of him retained a sense of lyricism of classical shape,something he learned from Webern,or perhaps pre-classic writers as Monteverdi.Even in his music which engaged aleatoric means,there is still a lyricism as the center of the musical agenda. The earlier "Quartet" from 1946 is indeed strange, it is a voice hidden,having not found a creative place yet, it sounds a little,in suggestion only, like Debussy mixed with the impassioned gate of Schoenberg. Arditti is marvelous in all this with clean transparent playing with a focus on each string part, something they are known for, emphasizing the fact that they are four soloists not a quartet. "Widmung"(dedication) is my favorite here written now in 1967 for violin solo,with a nod to Robert Schumann's piano solo, again passages that remain in the stratosphere for extended lengths are fantastic.Also the pizzicati passages of glissandi-like pizz. "Viola" from 1971 we have the mature Maderna now. He never really transformed his aesthetic, his creative gestures as dramatically as some composers, and here in "Viola" you have the same gestures as the early music of extreme colors, brutal attachs, and severe .The viola frequently travels in uncomfortably high regions. Arditti have a fantastic sense of the gritty sonority always, you can hear the bow scrap, as in these high passages,it renders a sublime ugliness."