Arditti String Quartet - Arditti (1989)

It may seem paradoxical to expect versatility as a principal endowment from an ensemble that plays hardly any music composed before 1900, but after listening to the Arditti String Quartet one can only agree with the players' contention that the 20th-century repertory offers an unprecedented universe of stylistic variety. The literature demands everything from manic, cacophonous sliding and lightning-fast bowing to lushly harmonized chordal passagess. In this disc, "Arditti" hops challengingly among several idiosyncratic styles. Conlon Nancarrow's canonic Quartet No. 3 itself inhabits several worlds, wavering between driven, straightforward counterpoint and disconnected pianissimo bursts. As for the rest, also offers warm-toned accounts of Ruth Crawford Seeger's lightly dissonant Quartet, Mr. Reynolds's chillingly picturesque "Coconino" and Iannis Xenakis's "Tetras," which begins with a rubbery cello swoop and evolves into an otherworldly sonority of a kind that used to be the sole province of electronic music. What the Arditti proves is that you can travel the twentieth-century musical landscape without losing your orientation.

Tracklist

Ludwig van Beethoven
Große Fuge, Op. 133

Conlon Nancarrow
Quartet no. 3
I
II
III

Ruth Crawford-Seeger
Quartet 1931
I
II
III
IV

Roger Reynolds
Coconino―a shattered landscape

Iannis Xenakis
Tetras

Gramavision R2 79440