Wigmore Hall, London
There was a time when premieres were rare events at the Wigmore Hall. Since John Gilhooly has been in charge, however, new music has been making more appearances, and the Hagen Quartet's programme provided a rare opportunity in this country to hear a major new work by the Austrian Georg Friedrich Haas. Between Mozart (the C major Dissonance Quartet, K465) and the most intensely autobiographical of all Shostakovich's 15 quartets, the Eighth, came the British premiere of Haas's Sixth Quartet.
Haas's music regularly shows his interest in spectralist ideas, and the Sixth Quartet requires the second violin and the viola to detune their lowest strings microtonally, so that the sound world is shifted and the open strings of the four instruments produce richly strange chords. In fact, everything in the work is constantly in flux, for the writing for all four instruments is full of trills, tremolos and glissandi, blurring what harmonic outlines there are: the aural equivalent of smearing the pages of the score before the ink had dried.
Sudden moments of clarity, when the quartet settles on to open-string fifths, provide a chance for the palette to clear. But it's not just harmonic stability that's needed, it could use some distinctive rhythmic profiles, too. The constant swooping and soaring provides very few of those. The most attritional moments have a Xenakis-like physicality about them, which are odd to hear coming from a group as suavely correct as the Hagens. But well before the end, the ear has tired of music that seems to be struggling towards a statement in spite of its own best efforts.
Vanessa Hudgens Sarah Michelle Gellar Olivia Munn Melissa Sagemiller Roselyn Sanchez
No comments:
Post a Comment