'Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.'
Writing music for the bottom drawer was a regular activity amongst composers within the Soviet Empire, music that the composer knew had no chance of publication due to rigid political and bureaucratic control of new music but nonetheless felt driven to record on manuscript. Ligeti was a Hungarian composer, who managed to escape to the West during the chaos of the 1956 Revolution. His Nocturnal Metamorphoses is clearly a successor to Bartók’s delicious night music, both of them relishing in the sounds of summer nights. This quartet has become immensely popular amongst young Quartets, it is edgy without being difficult, atmospheric without being obvious, with its twelve sections flowing into the one sparkling movement. Afterwards NOVO Quartet move on to Mozart’s great D minor quartet, the second of the six miraculous quartets he dedicated to Haydn. Legend has it that Mozart wrote this quartet while his wife Constanze was giving birth to their first child, her cries woven into the texture of the Andante. The minor key gives the whole work a delicious acerbic bite. The child was surely born by the time Mozart got to the Finale, a set of vivacious variations culminating in a dance for joy.
After the Interval we move into the rare mountain air breathed by Beethoven’s late quartets. The C sharp minor Quartet, composed almost exactly 200 years ago, stands at the mountain peak, seven movements following each other without a break, centred on a magical set of six variations at the heart of the work. If you have never heard it or if you have heard it fifty times, every live performance of this extraordinary work gives you moments to rejoice in.
