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Published: Wednesday, 22 January 2025 at 11:42 AM
Review: Bartók & Ligeti String Quartets (Marmen Quartet)
Bartók • Ligeti
Bartók: String Quartet No. 4; Ligeti: String Quartets
Marmen Quartet
BIS BIS-2693 67:59 mins
Clip: Ligeti: String Quartet No. 1 – Prestissimo
The story goes that the young Ligeti travelled to Budapest hoping to study with Bartók, only to find that the great composer had just departed for the US. Bringing the Hungarian pair together now seems a natural choice, and the excellent Marmen Quartet has placed Bartók’s dazzlingly dangerous Quartet No. 4 in between Ligeti’s First and Second, casting intriguing perspective on both composers; even today Bartók can seem the most adventurous, but it’s clear where Ligeti’s rhapsodic quirkiness is rooted.
The Marmen Quartet’s first album for BIS Records is an auspicious debut, since the four musicians do not only navigate some of the 20th century’s most challenging chamber repertoire with expert ensemble. More, they seem to have assimilated the music into their cells, performing it with an energetic vitality and colour that transforms both composers at their thorniest into riveting storytellers.
Their range of expression extends to brilliantly rendered technical effects in the Bartók’s scherzo-like second movement, contrasting with the persuasively passionate cello solo in the third, which seems from another world (plaudits to cellist Sinéad O’Halloran). The fertile imagination in Ligeti’s almost aphoristic eight-movement Quartet No. 1, from the early 1950s, paves the way for No. 2 from 1968, by which time Ligeti had gone in new directions; this time it is all special effects, dramatically contrasted ideas following one another like dreams and the pizzicato in the third movement phrasing almost like his hundred metronomes. Again, the group offers high-pixel definition of character, conveyed with mesmerising intensity. Jessica Duchen