Dusapin - Quatuors VI and VII

The Guardian 80

Arditti Quartet/OPRF/Rophé
(Aeon)

The Ardittis have already recorded the first five of Pascal Dusapin’s string quartets for Aeon, and this disc (released alongside a collection featuring all his pieces for solo cello) adds the most recent, two works composed in 2009. Except that, strictly speaking, Quatuor VI, subtitled Hinterland, isn’t a string quartet at all, but rather a work for quartet and orchestra. Four of its five movements are a sequence of tentatives d’épuisement, “attempts at exhaustion”, in which Dusapin pushes his material to its limits in music that is often densely worked and bewilderingly hyperactive. The quartet is always the focus, with the orchestra providing support and background textures – the hinterland, perhaps, of the title.

The remarkable Quatuor VII, Open Time, is on a different scale. It’s a huge set of 21 variations, lasting nearly 40 minutes in the Ardittis’ magisterial performance, all of which develops from the opening viola gesture, with its microtonal leaps and swoops. The music grows from this kernel with impressive assurance, constantly renewing itself, interrupted by the occasional moment of icy stillness, before the process takes off in a different direction.