Diotima Quartet: Boulez

The Strad Issue: May 2025

Description: A contribution to Boulez’s centenary casts fresh ears on the master

Musicians: Diotima Quartet

Works: Boulez: Livre pour cordes

Catalogue number: PENTATONE PTC5187360

In a letter to Stockhausen, the 20-something Boulez talked about ‘blowing up’ the string quartet, the way he had blown up sonata form in his previous work, the Second Piano Sonata. He had come up with six movements, playable together or in three pairs, juxtaposing progressively more extreme alternations of arrested and accelerated momentum.

Most of us – even most of us signed up to Boulez – are familiar only with the two parts of the first movement, and that in a later version for string orchestra. To survey the entire, hour-long Livre for the first time, with its fourth section posthumously completed by Philippe Manoury – well, I stand like Keats’s stout Cortez, ‘silent upon a peak in Darien’, contemplating the Pacific.

Boulez had Mallarmé rather than Keats or Homer in mind while writing the quartet. Not that the music demands familiarity with Mallarmé’s poetry, or for that matter with the late Beethoven quartets which Boulez was renewing even while blowing them up. Rather, it seems to operate more in terms of rhetoric than mood (just as Haydn and Janáček do in their quartets).

Maybe that impression is enhanced by the Diotima’s staggeringly articulate performance, and by the bewitching clarity of the German radio recording. Out of nowhere, the fifth section introduces long Beethovenian trills and a sensual extension of harmony, before the final piece returns to a prevailing spirit of densely allusive polyphony shared with Berg’s Lyric Suite. More poetic than painterly, fierce but never aggressive, complex but never obscure: this particular Livre is well worth the shelf space.

PETER QUANTRILL