Other Minds Festival: Concert 1 – Arditti Quartet Plays Wyschnegradsky & Haas
Join us on Saturday, March 23rd at the Taube Atrium Theater for the inaugural event of our 24th festival season: Concert 1 – Arditti Quartet Plays Wyschnegradsky & Haas
Single-minded and visionary composers are so often the ones most easily ignored by the changing currents of music taste. Ivan Wyschnegradsky (1893-1979) led a life characterized by exile and cultural exclusion; he was never part of any school, and the individuality of his work reflects his personal and lifelong determination to honor his deeply idiosyncratic muse. He was a founding father of microtonal composition and theory, yet he was at heart an expressionist, a spiritual descendant of Scriabin. Throughout his long life he sought audiences for his music but never compromised his artistic principles to gain the public ear. A mystical belief in the value of his work sustained him through these decades of neglect, affording his music surety and conviction.
The Arditti String Quartet of London, champions of Wyschnegradsky’s work, will perform his microtonal pieces for strings. While string music comprises a smaller portion of Wyschnegradsky’s catalogue than his better-known works for microtonal pianos, the Arditti Quartet makes a compelling case for Wyschnegradsky’s quartets, exploiting the expressive capabilities inherent to strings. The expanded scalar and harmonic palette, and wider variety of timbres lead the way to reforming a repertoire long confined to 12 equal-tempered tones.
Georg Friedrich Haas’ style makes extensive use of micro-polyphony, micro-intervals, and the exploitation of the overtone series; he is often characterized as a leading exponent of “spectral music.” String Quartet No 2 is a commission by the Wiener Konzerthaus for the Hagen Quartet, combining tonal, microtonal adjustments, temporal expansions and compressions resulting in a sometimes virtuoso, flickering sound picture. Tradition shines through again and again, but it appears as something lost, distant, clouded.
About the Arditti Quartet
The Arditti Quartet enjoys a world-wide reputation for their spirited and technically refined interpretations of contemporary and earlier 20th century music. Many hundreds of string quartets and other chamber works have been written for the ensemble since its foundation by first violinist Irvine Arditti in 1974. Many of these works have left a permanent mark on 20th century repertoire and have given the Arditti Quartet a firm place in music history. World premieres of quartets by composers such as Abrahamsen, Adès, Andriessen, Birtwistle, Britten, Cage, Carter, Denisov, Dillon, Dusapin, Fedele, Ferneyhough, Francesconi, Gubaidulina, Guerrero, Harvey, Kagel, Kurtag, Ligeti, Maderna, Manoury, Nancarrow, Reynolds, Rihm, Scelsi, Sciarrino, Stockhausen, Xenakis, and hundreds more show the wide range of music in the Arditti Quartet’s repertoire. The ensemble believes that close collaboration with composers is vital to the process of interpreting modern music and therefore attempts to work with every living composer it plays.
Concert 1 Program
Ivan Wyschnegradsky:
String Quartet No. 1 (1923-24, rev.) 1953-54
String Quartet No. 2 (1930-31)
String Quartet No. 3 in semitones (1945, rev. 1958-59)
Composition for string quartet (1960, rev. 1966-70)
INTERMISSION
Trio for violin, viola, and cello (1978-79)
Georg Friedrich Haas:
String Quartet No. 2 (1998)
More information about Other Minds Festival 24: https://www.otherminds.org/other-minds-festival-24/