The interest created in 2010 by Mark-Anthony Turnage’s first mature work for string quartet, Twisted Blues with Twisted Ballad, owed as much to the quartet’s Led Zeppelin influences as to Turnage’s own free-spirited writing for the Belcea Quartet. Four years on, Turnage’s new quartet, again entrusted to the Belceas, is another, much darker homage, this time to Sylvia Plath’s late poem Contusion, with which the new work shares its title. Plath’s bleak image of the flaring bruise, “the doom mark”, from which there can be no emotional recovery, is closely mirrored in the score.
This time, however, the musical voice is more wholly Turnage’s. Gone, though, is the often trademark eclecticism of some of his recent work. In its place comes an almost self-consciously disciplined side of the composer. Contusion is a concise, poignantly balanced one movement cry of pain. Its structure echoes classical sonata form, with its tight, numb and often repeated opening figure flowering into a much more anguished central section before the terse figure returns transformed yet unassuaged in a bleakly whispered ending in which the cello briefly takes wing. The Belceas played it with an intensity that suggests a modern classic. There will be plenty of opportunity to judge it more carefully when Contusion is played by all 12 ensembles taking part in the Wigmore’s international string-quartet competition at the end of March.
Even without the Turnage, this was a concert of enormous distinction. The Belceas opened with the third of Beethoven’s Opus 18 quartets, in D major, immediately capturing the arching and airy originality of a quartet that, while rooted in Haydn, seems permanently on the verge of transcending its own form. The closing presto was played with such character and sparkle that it felt like an opera buffa finale. After the interval, Jonathan Biss joined the Belceas for Brahms’s F minor piano quintet, a performance of terrific zip and bite, with Biss never missing a trick in the piano part but never distracting attention from the exhilarating ensemble either.
