Last year, I finally stumbled upon some chamber music written by Krzysztof Meyer. It was revelatory, in that it revealed to me a composer who writes chamber music every bit as good qualitatively as some core rep greats. The music sounds dense, knotty, gnarly, uncompromising, and brilliant. Perusing offerings at various recording vendors, I found other available recordings, but I waited until now to go for something else. That something else is the composer’s set of thirteen string quartets since very often composers write some of their best music for that ensemble. With a Naxos sale, I scooped up the set for the princely sum of $14 and change. Even if the quartets ended up sounding lousy, something I thought essentially impossible, I’d be out of pocket next to nothing. If they met expectations, well, now we’re talkin’.
Listening proceeded in volume order, so quartets 5, 6, and 8 came first. The Fifth starts off with an opening movement where the cello plays almost every note, and the music sounds dark and brooding and unforgiving, like Shostakovich minus the laughs. Things get more intense from there. The second movement is a nervous, grueling piece of music, like an Allan Pettersson symphony but in string quartet, but good. Meyer never lets up on the tension in the faster second and slower third movements, though maybe he does just a bit in the fourth movement, which ends with heaping helpings of solo cello, but the dark but not overwhelmingly heavy fifth movement returns to unremitting seriousness. This is one heckuva of a way for an ensemble to launch a quartet series. The Sixth sounds lighter in mood to start, but its dissonance and reliance on pizzicato and Sul ponticello lend it a modern sound, which remains whether music is fast or slow, and Meyer returns to unremittingly serious music in the concluding Lento. The Eighth can hardly be considered light, and the somewhat tart, slow, and serious opening gives way to intense and unwaveringly serious sounding music. It just never lets up for its duration, but it never sounds anything less than absolutely compelling, forcing the listener to await every note with something approaching aural avarice. A monumentally great opening to the cycle.
Volume two includes the Ninth, Eleventh, and Twelfth quartets. The Ninth, closely and airlessly recorded, which aids the work, starts off with high voltage stridency which doesn’t let up for the duration of the movement, and then the second wallops the listener’s ear with some superb harmonic invention that is at once hard to hear and impossible not to devour as greedily as possible, and the third dances around with all those pizzacati. The work continues along on a similar trajectory, returning to high voltage playing in the final, fifth movement, revisiting styles from earlier and revealing influences, but sounding distinct from them. The single movement Eleventh follows, and the dark, intense work fills a void, a void of music for those who think some of DSCH’s quartets sound too lightweight. The tension never really yields in this work, yet it does not wear the listener down. The massive Twelfth goes on and on, taking the listener on a ride, with much debt to DSCH, on whom the Meyer is a published expert. The movement names end up properly descriptive as well. The Vivo perks up, with nifty tremolos, and the Dolente expresses sorrow as well as any quartet has, and the Prestissimo is truly prestissimo. The whole thing works and hides its duration as the listener gets absorbed in every musical moment.
The third volume opens with the Seventh Quartet, and it continues on with the supremely high quality from the first note. The single movement work sounds like a discombobulated, almost unsteady musical representation of a troubled dream, though not quite a nightmare. The individual instruments at times sound uncannily distinct, and though they are playing the same piece, it sounds purposely disoriented, and the tension never lets up – fast, slow, those are just variations in how quickly the tension assaults the ears. Yet it never sounds too harsh or oppressive. Neat. The slow Lento that opens the first movement of the Tenth Quartet sounds like late DSCH in its desolation, but it transitions to an Allegro assai that switches to biting playing, and then it alternates styles seamlessly. The long, slow second movement likewise alternates between slow and slower music, yet it maintains tension such that its over fourteen-minute length doesn’t matter, and it does so while not feeling quick or feeling long – it feels like fourteen minutes well spent. The brief Scherzo starts off plucky and sort of playful, but Meyer ratchets up the intensity significantly in the middle section, and then in the long final movement, the music veers between melancholy and tense and fast and intense playing, again with transitions so seamless and old Lou would have approved. A big, beefy, weighty work. The disc closes with the composer’s Thirteenth. The five-movement quartet played attacca has four descriptive titles for the first four movements (Calmo, Impetuoso, Appassionato, Feroce) and then a perpetuum mobile Prestissimo closer. The second and fourth movements are brief, while the other three are more standard. It’s almost like a valedictory work, with every compositional device crammed in, in perfect proportion, in each movement, and at times it takes on an almost neo-romantic feel, in an uncompromisingly modern way. It’s a peach.
The cycle ends with the first four quartets, and here one can hear a younger composer at once expressing music in his own, unabashedly modernist voice, and some influences, including a bit of Bartok, to name one, which includes some near quotations. (Might as well borrow from the best.) The first two almost sound like apprentice works, but an apprentice destined to greatness, as it takes only until the single movement Second for the composer to hit his stride, where the intensity factor gets ratcheted up with some fierce unison writing and searing tension. The Third and Fourth sound like qualitative steps closer to the quartets that follow, with transitions nearly as seamless, scale just about as large, harmonies just about as dense, and every compositional technique included in just about as satisfying a manner. I do not want to make these seem like lesser works, because they are humdingers and hold the listener’s attention more than almost any quartets, it’s just they the quartets that follow offer even
more.
For these recordings, I had high expectations going in. They got smashed. For the first time in a long time, probably since I discovered the music of Cristóbal de Morales, listening to these works provided experiences where I listened as excitedly and intensely as I did when I first started discovering core rep classics. I cannot think of a body of post-war quartets that sound better, more significant, more immediately impactful than these, and Meyer’s achievements immediately rival the works of the Holy Tetrarchy. This is
great music; these are
masterpieces. For real. Clearly, I need to explore more of the composer’s music. He needs to have some Big Name conductors, artists, and ensembles take up his cause. In the meantime, in the cycle, the Wieniawski String Quartet delivers the goods at a world class level and Naxos delivers up to snuff if not always SOTA sound. I need to see about getting the Wilanów Quartet’s recordings.
One of my purchases of the century.