A guide to Ligeti’s style…<\/a><\/li> <\/ul> The Marmen Quartet\u2019s first album for BIS Records is an auspicious debut, since the four musicians do not only navigate some of the 20th century\u2019s 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.<\/p>
Their range of expression extends to brilliantly rendered technical effects in the Bart\u00f3k\u2019s scherzo<\/a>-like second movement, contrasting with the persuasively passionate cello solo in the third, which seems from another world (plaudits to cellist Sin\u00e9ad O\u2019Halloran). The fertile imagination in Ligeti\u2019s 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<\/a> in the third movement phrasing almost like his hundred metronomes<\/a>. Again, the group offers high-pixel definition of character, conveyed with mesmerising intensity.\u00a0Jessica Duchen<\/em><\/p>