Arditti ‘Grosse’ Is Lean, Cerebrally Muscular

The thorny struggles of Beethoven’s “Grosse” Fuge (Great Fugue), Opus 133, with which the Arditti String Quartet opened its concert Tuesday night at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, seemed a fitting entrance into the works that followed, selections from a century that has also been marked by compositional questing.

Appearing as part of the Laguna Chamber Music Series, violinists Irvine Arditti and Graeme Phillip Jennings, violist Dov Scheindlin and cellist Rohan de Saram approached the piece with lean-toned relentlessness, concentrating on its angular insistence and cerebral muscularity. Theirs was an unforgiving reading, without sentimentality even in the few gentler moments, driven, charged and wholly involving.

The Fugue is the only piece in the Arditti’s repertory not written in this century. On this occasion, it introduced quartets by Elliot Carter, Akira Nishimura and Gyorgy Ligeti, all of whom have collaborated with this ensemble during its 24-year history.

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Ligeti’s Quartet No. 2, composed in 1968, was the oldest of the three, the only one not commissioned for the Arditti. Its five movements explore variations on materials set out in the anxious first section--a hushed series of threatening murmurings that periodically explode into nervous confrontations. In the course of the remaining movements, the players traversed its prism visions with consuming attentiveness. They set up a hymn-like calm only to break it with Ligeti’s otherworldly tremblings and pizzicato outbursts. They delved into precise polymetrical tickings and challenged one another in brutal swarms of multistops before resolving--and finally dissolving--the material.

Carter’s Quartet No. 5 and Nishimura’s String Quartet No. 3, subtitled “Avian,” had been included on Monday night’s concert at Bing Theater, in Los Angeles, and were previously reviewed. Here too they received the kind of committed and communicative readings that have distinguished these champions of contemporary quartet literature.