Concert review: Diotima Quartet

Context was everything in the long first half of this Boulez anniversary recital. Forbidding on paper to some, perhaps, the interleaving of chapters from the early Livre pour Quatuor with contrapuncti from Bach’s late Art of Fugue gave the mind’s ear a full workout.

Using abrupt contrasts of imagery, Boulez sought to reflect the influence of the poet Mallarmé. This obsession with capturing poetry in music became a life’s work for Boulez much as refining and varying fugal process did for Bach. The Livre catches Boulez in his angry twenties, raw and unfiltered. Even then, however, he could not be other than French, and the Diotima’s coolly transparent tonal palette usefully underlined the composer’s inheritance from Ravel.

The Diotima made Parts Ia and I of the Livre sound almost playfully simple compared with the composer’s own later reworking for string orchestra. The 12-minute Part II remains a tough nut to crack, left in a provisional state at the composer’s death in 2016 like so much else of his output, and ‘completed’ by Philippe Manoury. Even here, however, the physical grammar and drama of a live performance served to explain gestures that had felt oblique on the group’s recent recording.

In between Bach and Boulez, the Quartet of Webern regained its true nature as a piece of distilled Romantic feeling and tone-painting, while the Diotima’s second-half Debussy Quartet breathed and flowed from start to finish. In concept and execution, a near-perfect recital, with all too few present to enjoy it.

PETER QUANTRILL