Few groups are more synonymous with playing modern compositions than the Arditti Quartet. And still fewer players than their indefatigable leader, Irvine Arditti – or “Mr Contemporary Music” as he refers to himself when I interview him from his home over Zoom.
The reason for our conversation is the quartet’s 50th birthday, although Arditti himself points out that, as the group’s only continuous member, it is only really one-quarter of a golden anniversary. The present line-up of Arditti (first violin), Ashot Sarkissjan (second violin), Ralf Ehlers (viola) and Lucas Fels (cello) has only been together since 2006, but the celebrations will belong to all.
A key part of this anniversary year will be a series of concerts in August, curated by Arditti, at the Suntory Hall in Tokyo, as part of the Suntory Hall Summer Festival. Arditti is delighted by the opportunity: along with the Moscow Philharmonic and the Vienna Musikverein, Suntory Hall is acoustically one of his favourite venues. He first played there in 1993, giving the premiere of Toshio Hosokawa’s first violin concerto, Landscape III. “I was amazed by the hall, the fact that I could play really soft things and still be heard over the orchestra”, he tells me. “Some halls are just too resonant. The quartet or the soloist gets amplified, but so does the orchestra. Suntory Hall does that but it also separates. And I always love going to Japan, it’s one of my favourite places to be in because it’s so different from anywhere else.”
The programmes for the three Suntory Hall concerts began to come together about two years ago. Arditti has had a long friendship with Hosokawa since the early 80s when they met in Darmstadt, and in 2022, the quartet performed at the Takefu International Music Festival in the city of Echizen, where Hosokawa is musical director. Here they heard the 33-year-old pianist Tomoki Kitamura, and were deeply impressed by this young player’s abilities in both classical and contemporary repertoire. The question arose as to whether Hosokawa would write a piece for the fiftieth anniversary. And if so, why not bring in Kitamura for a piano quintet?
The resulting piece, Oreksis (meaning “yearning” or “longing”), received its premiere at the Boulez Saal, Berlin, on 7th March this year. It marked 50 years to the day after the quartet’s first concert, at the Royal Academy of Music in London in 1974, where they played music by Krzysztof Penderecki. Its second performance will be the centrepiece of the Ardittis’ opening concert in Tokyo this August, where it will share a programme with two landmarks from the quartet’s history – Jonathan Harvey’s Quartet no.1 (1977), the first piece to have been written for them; and Helmut Lachenmann’s seminal Grido (2001), one of two pieces he has written for the group. The concert begins with Toru Takemitsu’s A Way a Lone, programmed in respect and gratitude for Takemitsu and his introducing the quartet to Japan. (An orchestral concert in the festival, also programmed by Arditti, features Iannis Xenakis’s rarely-heard birthday tribute to Takemitsu, Tuorakemsu.)
As well as Takemitsu and Hosokawa – whose Fluss for string quartet and orchestra is also featured – the concerts include Akira Nishimura’s Quartet no. 5 “Shesha”, written for Arditti’s 60th birthday in 2013, and a new quartet by Naoki Sakata. But it is the presence of the core masterworks, all of them written for the group, that set these apart as Arditti events: Harvey, Lachenmann, Elliott Carter’s Fifth Quartet, Harrison Birtwistle’s The Tree of Strings, Brian Ferneyhough’s Third Quartet and Xenakis’ Tetras. The only omission is Ligeti’s Second Quartet, a signature piece since the Ardittis took it over from the LaSalle quartet in the 1970s, but left out on this occasion because it was not written for them.
Some of these pieces, including the Ligeti, Lachenmann and Xenakis, have been in the quartet’s repertory for decades. I’m intrigued to know if they still approach them in the same way after all that time.
“Oh yes”, Arditti replies.
But how do you do that? You must have played them hundreds of times…
“Because we’ve played them hundreds of times”, he replies. “We know how they go. Why would we change when – if not all of us – I have worked with the composer and they have guided our interpretation of the way they want to hear the piece? We have helped to make these pieces repertoire, and I’m very proud of that. But there’s certainly no need for us to change our interpretation.”
I’m a little surprised by this response; I’m not sure all performers would defer so much to the composer’s authority. I offer as a counter-example Yo-Yo Ma, who has recorded the Bach Cello Suites at several different times of his life and found new interpretations and new insights as a result. Does the Arditti Quartet have less freedom than Ma because they have worked directly with the composer (who may still be with us)? Or is this a personal position?
“I think our performances mature”, Arditti replies. “But I don’t consciously try to do something different to sell another version of the pieces that we’ve already recorded. Change happens, but it’s not a conscious desire to make change, like with a classical artist, to imprint their interpretation on the music. I think the music needs to speak for itself. And the whole concept of working with a composer is to find a mean between what the composer wants and how we see the music. It’s not like in classical music: you’re trying to do what the composer wrote all the time; you’re not looking to present the piece in another light. Or at least I’m not.”
Those personal connections with the composers themselves may shape the interpretive license that Arditti feels he has, but they have also fostered a highly refined spirit of attentiveness and care that is the most characteristic feature of the quartet’s sound: a respectful precision in the face of the most daunting challenges that has helped make it one of the leading ensembles of their era. Irvine met both Ligeti and Stockhausen at Darmstadt in the late 60s when he was still a teenager, having already familiarised himself with all their music to date. This is why, he says, he held a decades-long ambition to get Stockhausen to write him a quartet – even if the piece that eventually transpired was the infamous Helicopter String Quartet. (Arditti recounts his relationships with Stockhausen and many other composers in his book Collaborations, published by Schott.)
Over the course of five decades, that Stockhausen quartet has been the only real surprise, he says. Written as part of the composer’s seven-day operatic cycle LICHT, it requires the four musicians to take off in four separate helicopters (loaned from the Royal Dutch Air Force for the premiere performance in 1995), perform a 30-minute aerial ballet while they play, and then to participate in an audience Q&A on the ground when they have landed. “Other than that, I didn’t expect anything, didn’t have a plan.”
This year is a small exception: in addition to the Suntory Hall concerts and other birthday events, the quartet have commissioned several new works. On previous anniversaries they have turned to composers with whom they already have a strong relationship – the occasion serving as a way to strengthen those bonds. This year, however, they have consciously turned to composers who have never written for them before: Chaya Czernowin, Andrzej Kwieciński, Cathy Milliken, Sarah Nemtsov, Stefan Prins and Diana Soh.
“Often I’m guided by how people are doing, and sent pieces to listen to”, he says when I ask him how he finds new composers to commission. “But I think this year was my choice, both in the choice of contemporary composers that we would commission and of course all the programmes in Suntory Hall”. It’s an eclectic, international group that covers composers both young and more experienced, and a range of styles from the theatricalized noise of Prins to the softer acoustic textures of Kwieciński and Milliken.
In many ways, Arditti’s 50 years at the head of his quartet has changed the face of contemporary music. The repertory for quartet – simply the possibilities of what a quartet could mean or do – has come a long way from (but is also recognisably continuous with) that Penderecki concert at the RAM in 1974. From the videos and dancing of Jennifer Walshe’s EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT to the hour-long total darkness of Georg Friedrich Haas’s Quartet no. 3 “In iij. Noct.” – the Arditti Quartet’s willingness to try anything, and to give it the care it deserves, has been instrumental in enabling that expansion.
Reflecting on the wandering path that got him and his group to where they are now, Arditti is modest about how active a role he played. “I didn’t plan much, I just did”, he says. “I’m not at all a religious person, but I feel I was almost sent to do it. I could have played my entire career in the orchestra but I felt I was not sent to play in an orchestra but was sent to play contemporary music. Sent by whom, I don’t know. I never made decisions to go down one path or another. I was always guided by events.”
Irvine Arditti and the Arditti Quartet perform at Suntory Hall from 22nd to 29th August.
This article was sponsored by Suntory Hall.
