Hearing a new work by Australian composer Liza Lim is always a moment to savour: she is a composer with a highly distinctive creative aesthetic that engages the heart, the head, and the soul. At Wigmore Hall, the JACK Quartet gave the UK premiere of String Creatures, a substantial three-movement piece lasting around 30 minutes. It rounded-off their day-long programme that included names such as Ruth Crawford Seeger, Morton Feldman and Elliott Carter. She was not out of place in that notable company of string writers. The players – violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, viola player John Pickford Richards and cellist Jay Campbell – are clearly committed fans, bringing to a superb performance their considerable technical accomplishments and sonic mastery.
Lim has a thing about strings, seeing in them “something magical”; she inscribes them with “an animacy that offers a generative language for thinking about relations in the world”. In a general way one can see what she is driving at – the ties that bind, entanglement, being caught in a web. The alchemy that transformed that thinking into musical material was inevitably lost to the listener, but what emerged from the crucible signalled the compositional brilliance involved in that transformation. The sound was produced through arresting gestures, both physical and sonic; the dynamic range scratched the skin and blew on the eyelids; the textures threaded their way through the veins. It was a whole-body experience that testified to the JACK Quartet’s ability to get to the heart of the matter.
That gift for finding and interrogating the essentials of a piece was also evident in the set of four pieces which made up the rest of the programme. Two of them continued the ‘Modern Medieval’ thread (or string) running through the day. Wulliman’s Dave’s Hocket (receiving its UK première), references Machaut’s Hoquetus David and Arvo Pärt’s Frates; it glistened with the composer's fine sense of colour and timbre and, as the opening piece, lulled the audience into a brief trance. A rude awakening came with Gabriella Smith’s Carrot Revolution, a wild rumpus with Pérotin and The Who sharing the same stage. The title comes from what is almost certainly an apocryphal story about Paul Cézanne insisting that a freshly observed carrot would start a revolution – a very French idea. However, having been transfixed, if only momentarily, by Smith’s interpretation of the story I am ready to believe that carrots are more fun than velvet for taking over the world. In that, I would have the JACK Quartet as fellow-travellers.
What can one say about Feldman’s Structures that would adequately capture the sense of wonder encased in six minutes of near silence? Had I the time and a publisher I would settle down to sketch out a monograph-length exposition of its mesmerising attraction, its elegant proportions and, of course, its transcendent beauty. Otto et al would be cited as a primary source, interpreters of originality and conviction. That same accolade also captures their reading of Cenk Ergün’s Sonare, a piece whose sound world is not even a distant relative of Feldman’s. The development of the work was an iterative collaboration with the players, and they did seem to have it under their skin. Its discordant rhythmic drive was certainly enthralling, as the composer intended – a listener two rows in front of me was caught up in its headiness; but it also had a sense of impending doom, which was momentarily disquieting. Ergün and Smith must be on someone’s list of agitators.
