Silesian String Quartet - NOSPR

This is the 12th seasons  when the Silesian String Quartet is curating its original concert cycle at the NOSPR. The current edition, entitled The Strange and the Curious, will take us on a diverse and surprising musical journey. It is devoted to works that are rarely performed, strikingly unconventional, and distinctive in character. Each of them opens a new chapter, often turbulent in its history and always unusual in form and timbre. Over the course of five concerts, the audience are invited to discover fresh perspectives on the string quartet, including settings that extend the ensemble with additional instruments.

Anton Webern, one of the most significant representatives of the Second Viennese School, exerted a profound influence on the course of 20th-century music. Much of his output is striking in its brevity, each piece marked by lapidary expression and an extraordinary precision of structure. Yet the two works included in this concert reveal the evolution of his style and its contrasting facets. Langsamer Satz, composed in 1905 and inspired by Webern’s love for his cousin Wilhelmine Mörtl, belongs more clearly to the aesthetic of late Romanticism than to the dodecaphonic experiments of his later years. By contrast, in Sechs Bagatellen Webern arrives at a marked reduction of form and a dissolution of the bonds between sounds, i.e. the traits that would become defining features of the compositional technique he initiated – pointillism. The work is exceptionally brief: the entire cycle lasts no more than 3.5 minutes, with the longest of the six bagatelles extending to only 70 seconds. Dynamics rarely rise above pianissimo, so that each sound emerges in isolation and acquires its own timbral quality. To this day, the work is regarded as one of the most startling in 20th-century chamber music. Arnold Schönberg, commenting on his student’s composition, pointed out that: ‘These pieces can only be understood by those who believe that music can express things that can only be conveyed through music.’

A radically different atmosphere emerges in Black Angels for electric string quartet by George Crumb, composed in 1970. Subtitled Thirteen Images from the Dark Land, the work is steeped in symbolism and reveals the composer’s fascination with numerology. Through the use of electrically amplified instruments Crumb creates a unique sound effect. The performers rub their bows against crystal glasses, play with specially designed thimbles, and use maracas and tam-tams. Yet the quartet does not entirely abandon tonal reference: few allusions could be more classical than the quotation from Schubert’s String Quartet ‘Death and the Maiden’.

[Julia Broniowska]