Three flavours of disappointment: Ligeti Quartet at King’s Place
Ligeti Quartet
King’s Place, Hall Two
Unreserved, £14.50
10 November 2018
King’s Place page
Programme
Lachenmann: Gran Torso
Kerry Andrew: tInNiTuS sOnGs
Haas: In iij. Noct
In principle I admire the Ligeti Quartet for putting on such a programme. There aren’t many young quartets who would play Lachenmann’s Gran Torso; apparently this was the London premiere of Haas’s In iij. Noct, written to be performed in complete darkness – and so undeniably this was a concert worth going to. In the event, however, I enjoyed it rather less than the anticipation of it, for a variety of reasons.
The Lachenmann is a tremendously exciting piece but I think it is just out of reach of the Ligeti. Others will, I’m sure, think I’m much too harsh, and even I should and can admire them for performing it as well as they did. But though they played with concentration, the piece didn’t cohere to become more than the sum of its parts, and a few inevitable fluffs helped to destabilize those parts further. They ain’t no Arditti, is what I’m saying, which though an unfair comparison is all I could think.
I was disappointed in a different way by the evening’s world premiere. I’ve been told enough impressive things about Kerry Andrew to feel I should reserve judgement on her music until I hear something other than tInNiTuS sOnGs. On its own it would not encourage me to explore further. There is so little to it it feels as though it could have been knocked off in an afternoon; all it comes to is the quartet intoning the ‘slightly sharp B4’ of Andrew’s tinnitus before rolling into some folksy doodling on that B4. Andrew herself narrates around the quartet, but while that might make it more personal it unfortunately doesn’t make it much more interesting.
Disappointment of a third kind came in the Haas. Sitting in complete darkness is very thrilling; the scarcity of In iij. Noct performances gives it much caché; the idea of it, four dispersed sound machines desperately trying to make contact across the void, is superb. The reality doesn’t live up. Despite trying very hard King’s Place couldn’t make their Hall Two completely dark, and it didn’t take long for my eyes to acclimatize enough to see the movements of the player we were nearest, the cello. This is still quite cool but there is a limit on how long I can be excited by it. The nature of the performance environment means the music is by necessity not exactly simplistic but nevertheless performable without music and by cues. From initial enthusiasm for the shrieks from distant corners I dithered into boredom, impressed by the players but not interested in the music. And then you just wait for it to end.
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