Henri Dutilleux and Pascal Dusapin - Works for String Quartet

Henri DUTILLEUX (1916-2013)

  Ainsi la nuit

Pascal DUSAPIN (b.1955)

Time zones

Quatuor III

Arditti String Quartet

It's an ironic characteristic of 20th-century music in general that Dutilleux, a modern master of orchestral music and large scale forms, might have produced his masterpiece with Ainsi la nuit, a string quartet of 17 minutes. Yet the intimate medium bears the weight of his succinct lyricism and dense passion, with the economy characteristic of a great composer of his maturity. Pascal Dusapin's two quartets, following his elder colleague's masterwork on this disc, don't fare quite as well: Dusapin is a gifted young French composer fascinated with the sounds of New York minimalism, but his sonorous writing, however pleasing, seem simplistic and overbearing when placed next to Dutilleux's music. Dutilleux's quartet alone, however, more than justifies the purchase of this record; and the Arditti Quartet, as always, is superb. --Joshua Cody

Dutilleux's music has a deep brooding at times narrative to fulfill. His creativity is magnitized towards the unmentionable, that abstract phanthom that Sartre once said we can only reach with phanthom hands. "Ainsi la nuit" involves, engages the deep mysteries, the unknowness,the opaqueness and sensuality of the night. The nocturne is perhaps the most enduring genre in music,having a formidable longevity in how the night has excited the most imaginative musical minds, as Bartok, Chopin and Carter.A loose translation of "ainsi la nuit" is "Of the Night", or "such is the night", but there are new interpretive readings here that Arditti brings to this work you may not have experienced before. These undefined narrative images of Dutilleux, Arditti simply keeps this realm at a distance allowing their formidable timbral clarity and virtuosity of extended means to speak as the works voice.Otherwise the dnager with Dutilleux music is that it can transgress into the commonplace lyricism. That is a dnager Arditti admirably avoids here. And there are wonderful sheaths of timbral string canvas to explore interpretively here with barely perceptible tremoli,pencil thin harmonics, wonderfully placed plucked tones, like high up on the Cello's "c" string, a warmer effect.There is also an overwheliming ensemble-like "voice" where Arditti speaks as one,yet reamining as their signature constitution as four independent soloists, unlike the more harmonious, blended Kronos Quartet.

There are seven images here portrayed and interpreted 1. Nocturne, 2.Miroir d'espace,3.Litanies, 4 Litanies 2, 5. Constellations, 6. Nocturne 2, and lastly 7. Temps suspendu. This is Dutilleux's only quartet from 1976 and is representative of his late period deeply felt in his orchestral canvas "Timbre, Espace et Mouvement", and the Violin and Cello Concertos.

The "Time Zones" of Pascal Dusapin has also a formidable aesthetic frame to explore,more like an unattached, attached on-going diary. There are some 24 movements here, all written at different times and places, and that seems to be an important seminal dimension of the work. I found it distracting and really not producing the aesthetic complexity of the life world that living inhabiting different metropoli may impart to the creative persona. Many of the initial movements I found lame and predictably the same, those written in Rome, Rotterdam, Sao Paulo. It's not until we arrive at Time Zone #18 where a trio manifests itself for two violins and viola where the blood begins to become engaged. This #18, is a blistering gestural 'zone', with great abandoned virtuosity. Dusapin's imagery,his creative energy seems to become animated with relatively miniature frames, as the duet and trio. (He has wonderful unaccompanied solos, Indeed, and a trio "musique fugitives".) Yet the miniature musical frame doesn't seem to interest Dusapin as say Gyorgy Kurtag or Nicolaus A. Huber have impressively surveyed in their work.

Dusapin's "Quarter #3" is a bit more focused, with more assertive gestures. And now he has the overall classic coherence, the unfolding of the movements working for him.