On 18 and 21 July Melbourne Chamber Orchestra perform Peter Sculthorpe’s String Quartet No.8 (1969) at Melbourne Recital Centre.
The 16-minute work is cast in five movements – the first and last being almost entirely for solo cello, written, along with the third movement, with an improvisatory feel. The basic ideas of the piece are derived from Balinese ketungen – rice-pounding music – and the popular song play arja. The metrical patterns used in the quicker sections of the second and fourth movements, which employ an extremely limited number of notes, are drawn from Indonesian musical traditions, and have a static, ritualistic character; they contrast with the freer character of the flanking and central movements.
String Quartet No.8 was premiered in 1970 by the Allegri Quartet at Wigmore Hall and has since been recorded by the Kronos, Goldner, and Brodsky Quartets. The 1986 Kronos recording, in particular, on its first album for Elektra Nonesuch, brought Sculthorpe’s masterpiece to a global audience. In 2018 the second movement of the piece was choreographed by Itzik Galili for The Gift, a solo dance show starring Eric Gauthier at Theaterhaus Stuttgart. It was performed in part in 2022 by the Goldner Quartet at the Tasmanian Chamber Music Festival as part of the focus Sculthorpe and his Legacy; in March 2024 the quartet showcased his String Quartet No.18 at the Adelaide Festival, alongside music by Matthew Hindson, as part of their valedictory tour this season.
Scottish Ensemble have also turned to Sculthorpe’s chamber music for strings in summer 2024 – in June they toured the first movement of Sculthorpe’s String Sonata No.3, a version for string orchestra (with optional didjeridu) of his String Quartet No.11 (Jabiru Dreaming), which was latterly given a New Zealand tour from William Barton and the Brodsky Quartet.
The first movement of the 15-minute piece is inspired by the living, indigenous music of the Kakadu National Park in northern Australia; it contains rhythmic patterns found in the music of the area, some of which also suggest the gait of the jabiru, a species of stork. Scottish Ensemble give a further performance of String Sonata No.3 at London’s Southbank Centre on 29 September.