My latest (modern) classical CD purchases were an excellent new recording, warmly praised by the composer himself, of a piece that means a great deal to me: Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians; and Dark With Excessive Bright, a disc featuring two arrangements of the title piece along with four other works by Missy Mazzoli, which also proved to be very much to my taste.
‘Dark With Excessive Bright’ began life as a concerto for double bass and string orchestra. Having a particular fondess of the dark sonorities of the contrabass, I would have loved to hear that on CD, but instead the album is bookended with versions re-arranged so that Peter Herresthal’s violin is the solo instrument. He’s backed by a string orchestra on the first track, then has the sparser support of a string quartet on the final one. The scaffolding of the piece proves flexible enough that both versions work admirably well. The intervening works are a varied bunch all likewise well worth hearing.
I’d been more ambivalent about my previous pair of classical buys: two sets of string quartet recordings featuring music by Philip Glass & György Ligeti.
Issued last year were Quatuor Tana’s première recordings of Glass’s 8th & 9th quartets, the latter adapted from music composed to accompany a stage performance of King Lear. This theatrical 9th is sombre, as befits the play it soundtracked, and features no few sonically striking passages, particularly the section near the close of the restless first movement where the cello takes centre stage; but for all that it seemed to me slightly short on cohesion, and with a finalé that didn’t quite convince; whereas the subtler 8th holds together more persuasively, its melancholy slow movement the highlight.
Ligeti’s two numbered quartets are formidably challenging and played with commanding aplomb by Quatuor Diotima on their recent album Metamorphosis. For all their wit & wealth of invention, though, these are still works I find it difficult to love. When it comes ’50s & ’60s modernist quartets my preference would be for Penderecki’s over these. Also on the same disc is a fascinating two-movement ‘Andante and Allegretto’ by the Hungarian, a relic of the first phase of his compositional career in Budapest when he was obliged to try (at least some of the time) to please the Communist musical establishment.