String Quartet No. 1; String Quartet No. 2; String Quartet No. 3; String Trio; String Quartet
Arditti Quartet/Gilbert Nouno (live electronics)
AEON: AECD0975 (2009)
‘His four works for the medium span his career thus far, forming a coherent progression of musical thought, while retaining an individuality of temperament… Harvey’s fascination with the nature of sound allied to a sense of spirituality shines through the Quartets. The First (1977), for instance, periodically analyses and diffracts individual pitches in a way that might be described as spectral, though is also sounds like an agitated version of Scelsi.
The Arditti Quartet’s committed and refined playing is as superlative as ever, reflecting their long-lasting association with Harvey’s music. The collective holding of breath in the middle of the Second Quartet is haunting in its beauty as the cello’s gossamer thin, stratospherically high melody hangs in the air before the oncoming storm.
The Fourth Quartet adds a new dimension. Fragments of playing undergo metamorphosis through live electronics and flit around the listener, as if making the ultimate response to questions about the nature of string sound raised in the First and Third quartets. While the SACD sound is wonderful in the earlier quartets, in the Fourth it provides a sensational aural tour de force.’
BBC Music Magazine (Christopher Dingle), June 2009
‘The Arditti are surely the perfect interpreters of Jonathan Harvey's chamber works, unfussily accommodating the requirements of a composer whose directions involve playing certain sections in masculine or feminine personalities, and noting "hot" and "cold" chord distinctions.
Here, they manage to depict both Harvey's development through four String Quartets spanning a quarter-century, and the sustained focus of his style. The String Quartet No 1 from 1977 remains a remarkable piece, progressing from quiet smearings of gossamer glissandi, through more animated passages of angular, spiky flurries, reaching a feverish climax of spluttering pizzicato before resolving into a sort of brittle acquiesecence.’
The Independent (Andy Gill), 17 May 2009
‘Jonathan Harvey composed his First String Quartet in 1977, and has returned to the form once a decade since, composing all four for the Arditti Quartet, who play them with such energy and precision here. Only the Fourth Quartet, completed in 2003, uses the real-time digital transformations of instrumental sound Harvey has explored so successfully, but the three preceding quartets reflect his interest in electronic music, whether it's in the way the First builds its opening paragraph by using the overtones of the opening pitch as a kind of aural scaffolding, or the way the lines of the 1995 Third Quartet seem to split into shards as if resynthesised by a computer. Yet, when Harvey employs the hardware in the Fourth, his music literally gains another dimension, as the sounds are spatialised around the listener and, using software designed at Ircam in Paris, can create another grammar of movement in space alongside his manipulation of harmony, rhythm and timbre. The Fourth Quartet is a remarkable achievement, and Harvey's journey towards it is mapped very clearly on these discs.’
The Guardian (Andrew Clements), 24 April 2009
