Arditti Quartet Returns With a Program of Premieres

As might be expected, the Arditti Quartet brings a program laden with premieres to its Monday Evening Concert tonight. The agenda at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art boasts the world premiere of Dorrance Stalvey’s first string quartet, the U.S. premiere of Gyorgy Kurtag’s “Officium Breve in Memoriam Andreae Szervansky” and the local premiere of Conlon Nancarrow’s Quartet No. 3.

Long the darlings of the European festival circuit, the Arditti Quartet first came to Los Angeles with the UK/LA Festival in 1988, when it appeared on a Monday Evening Concert. Last summer, the Arditti championed Boulez at the Ojai Festival.

“From the very beginning, the intention was to play contemporary music,” first violinist Irvine Arditti says of the ensemble he founded in 1974. “I felt the need for a quartet that took it seriously. We did it because we enjoyed it.”

In that, the La Salle Quartet was Arditti’s model. The Arditti Quartet generally sticks to the high road in repertory and performance ambience, eschewing the cross-over pieces and visual elements characteristic of many Kronos Quartet concerts.

Without recourse to such audience-broadening devices, the Arditti have nonetheless developed a large following in Europe, through teaching residencies, television and radio shows and more than 20 recordings, as well as concert appearances. The quartet has been a full-time enterprise for its members since 1980.

Success in the supposedly arcane and limited field of contemporary music has not taken Arditti by surprise, however.

“I’m not really surprised,” he says, “because it didn’t come quickly. We’ve been working at it for a long time. I think contemporary music has become much more diverse, not so much a ghetto area, in the last 10 to 15 years. It is not a daunting prospect--or at least, it doesn’t have to be--for an audience.”

Stylistic diversity has its price, however, in the extra demands it puts on the performers in terms of versatility and sheer rehearsal time. “We try to be open-minded,” Arditti says about his ensemble’s repertory, which now includes more than 270 quartets by composers from Dieter Acker to Ramon Zupko. They are bringing 20 works on this tour alone.

“One does need an awful lot of time with this repertory,” Arditti says, in a telephone conversation after a rehearsal at the ensemble’s London base. “It takes meticulous work to put a piece together.”

Some of the pieces on the Arditti’s Monday-evening program are already well prepared. Nancarrow’s Quartet No. 3 and Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Quartet are on the group’s latest recording.

Stalvey’s new work, however, may be in rehearsal almost up to the time of its premiere. The players were to arrive from Berkeley on Sunday, and spend the afternoon as well as much of today in consultation with the composer, in a collaborative process which Arditti says is very important to the ensemble and its efforts.

In at least one way, Stalvey’s piece has special meaning for the Arditti. Each player has thematic patterns based on pitches indicated in various ways by the letters of his name: Arditti (which creates a minor 9th chord, according to Stalvey); second violinist David Alberman, violist Levine Andrade and cellist Rohan de Saram.

Stalvey, curator of music at the museum, says that his first string quartet was something of a departure for him. “Their material is their name, and it’s developed like a conversation between the four. The dictates of a string quartet bring out something different in a composer, which, I guess, is the history of the medium.”

The composer is reluctant to say much more about his piece, and Arditti was similarly disinclined to describe a work that has not yet been fully prepared or played in public. “I’m a firm believer that music is not to be talked about, it is to be heard,” he says pontifically.

The rest of the program consists of Alfred Schnittke’s Quartet No. 2 and Kurtag’s “Officium Breve in Memoriam Andreae Szervansky.” Szervansky was a Hungarian composer who was an important influence on Kurtag in his change from tonal to serial composition. The 15 fragments of the “Officium Breve” include quotations from Webern and Szervansky.