Even Quatuor Diotima don’t usually plan programmes as uncompromising as this. It was given as part of the Spitalfields Music winter festival, in the church familiar from the TV series Rev, with creaking pews and passing police sirens adding playful counterpoint to the music. It culminated in an exhilarating performance of Bartók’s 1928 String Quartet No 4. Up until then, however, the four players had barely had to play a note in conventional fashion. Instead, they used slithering, skittering or overturned bows, and sliding or explosively plucking fingers: anything, almost, except the usual.
Gérard Pesson’s String Quartet No 2: Bitume, receiving its UK premiere, began with the players worrying around a single, high pitch, and using their bows so they looked and sounded like windscreen wipers. The sounds that dominated were delicate but never fragile, and were underpinned by an insistent, galloping pulse. The piece found a kind of resolution as the four players, always separate, began to coalesce. Then, in the closing section, it seemed that the ride was beginning again, in another direction.
Transience, a new work by Sam Hayden, concentrated on the changes in a sound from first attack to dying away, and from one pitch to another – the latter to an obsessive degree. In the earlier sections it began to feel as if notes were constantly sliding away, up or down, to the extent that the musical tension was undermined. Later passages lingered more satisfyingly. Hayden’s programme note talks of giving ensembles the freedom to edit sections out – which may make work better.
Hayden’s mentor was the late Jonathan Harvey, whose 1995 Quartet No 3 seems to examine the same concepts as Pesson and Hayden, but with comparatively elegant concision. From the gossamer inhalations and exhalations at the start, to the cello at the centre drawing all the instruments on to a single note, to the multi-layered swoops at the climax, Quatuor Diotima made it sound vibrant and often very beautiful.
• The festival runs until 16 December.
