Arditti Quartet

The Arditti Quartet is one of the world’s leading string quartets and its excellent interpretations of contemporary music have made it one of new music’s most significant allies. Numerous works have been dedicated to and premiered by the quartet. In this year’s MaerzMusik we can experience string quartets Georges Aperghis, Brian Ferneyhough, Hugues Dufourt, Olga Neuwirth and James Clarke, the latter ones as German premieres.

The string quartet, an exchange between intelligent individuals? Not in the case of Quartet Movements by Aperghis, in which the quartet appears as a “harmonious body’’, where “none of the musicians possess an identity”. His chords resemble “objets trouves”, they are simply there.

In Dum Transisset I–IV Brian Ferneyhough draws upon a series of polyphonic pieces by the Renaissance composer Christopher Tye. These provide the starting point for contrasting and complex new inventions which cut through the historical material yet allow the piece to fade away with the “gently confused and anxious attempt to use Tye’s material as a cure for the outbreak of chaos”.

Musical complexity together with clear and communicative forms and structures are also features of the work of James Clarke. “Theories and explanations follow after music like a seagull behind a trawler,” says Clarke. “For me, composing is an act of travel and discovery, of giving sounds, ideas, connections physical shape. Above all, it is extremely logical and precise. It doesn’t construct any theories.”

The Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth finds what can be regarded as a similarly “absolute” and – in contemporary artistic terms – highly significant musical language. At MaerzMusik – “Utopia [lost]” we will hear her new string quartet in the realms of the unreal.

Uneasiness by Hugues Dufourt, named after an essay by John Locke, describes in extreme registers a state of discomfort, a chaotic state of mind “on the threshold between longing and promised hope”. At the centre lies the viola’s maledictory monologue until the music finally intensifies and plummets into a gloomy drought, according to Dufourt.