Music Reviews : Arditti Quartet Performs at UCLA

Not for the Arditti String Quartet are the vernacular blandishments of postmodernism, mixed-media spectaculars or attention-getting costumes. Instead, the self-effacing British ensemble concentrates on some of the world’s toughest music, usually in premiere performances.

Such was the case Sunday afternoon, when the Arditti introduced a dizzyingly diverse group of recent European quartets to a sparse audience at Schoenberg Hall, UCLA.

All of the pieces were strong and characterful, but the knockout came at the end in the form of Henri Dutilleux’s “Ainsi la nuit” from 1976, the oldest work on the agenda. There, gusts of modal melody blow through a tautly structured soundscape of Bartokian eeriness and timbrel variety. Its expressive details were presented with exquisite care by the quartet, violinists Irvine Arditti and David Alberman, new violist Garth Knox, and cellist Rohan de Saram.

There was an elegiac or nocturnal character to much of the proceedings, launched with Alexander Goehr’s String Quartet No. 4, “Memorial for John Ogdon.” Harmonically and rhythmically allusive, it spins a web of rapt, haunted lines, quoting Busoni’s “Berceuse Elegique” literally at one point and in spirit through the rest of the work.

“La Souris sans sourire,” by Franco Donatoni, proved a well-organized collection of ensemble etudes based on inventive sound constructions, from scratchy scurryings to big swooping glissandos. The form does seem episodic, but it also has a real cumulative power and fascination.

Pascal Dusapin’s Quartet No. 2, “Time Zones,” brings together five movements of a projected 24-section piece determined by the world’s 24 time zones. It shares similar sonic obsessions with the Donatoni piece, though in generally more lyrical or sustained veins, vividly colored.

Sofia Gubaidulina’s Quartet No. 3 was the only work on the program not a local premiere. The ensemble maintained interest in the lengthy pizzicato ruminations, and then built the bowed finale into a powerful statement, while resolving all the accumulated tensions, explicit and implicit.