Dynamic Meredith and revelatory Ligeti at Sheffield’s iconic Leadmill

On Friday, the Ligeti Quartet released their new album, Nuc, a collection of pieces by Anna Meredith. One night earlier they launched the album at this gig at The Leadmill in Sheffield. “Gig” is surely the right word, as they took advantage of the setting throughout, from dry ice shrouding the stage at the outset (and still masking the players as they launched into the track Blackfriars, originally from Varmints, Meredith’s acclaimed debut album) to the atmospheric light-show that accompanied some of the performance. A dreamy red glow enveloped Honeyed Words, a cooler blue-and-silver sheen lit Shill (two further tracks from that album), before the full range of lighting rig effects was let loose in Tuggemo for quartet and electronics, the last item on the official setlist.    

Meredith is one of a number of contemporary composers to straddle the worlds of classical and pop/electronica. Stylistic “fingerprints” include relentlessly driving rhythms, string glissandi and the sort of repetition-with-variation patterns familiar from the “process music” repertoire of (post-) minimalists the world over. Yet, as Jones observed in introducing some of the numbers, this is also music with a heart, music with emotion and feeling, highlighted here in their performance of Meredith’s first composition for quartet, Songs for the M8, in which Richard Jones’ tender, melancholy viola solo in the third of the five short movements stood out powerfully. The other entirely original composition, Chorale, for string quartet and sampled MRI scanner, was a grittier proposition all round, but (as I can testify from having spent some time inside such a machine) it caught vividly the overwhelming sonic experience such a location generates for the person within it.

Five of the works on the programme were arrangements by Jones taken from Meredith’s electronica albums. Of these, the mesmeric Honeyed Words was probably the most persuasive, its hypnotic trance-like state ideally suiting the quartet’s tight control and balance. Shill lacked a little of the sense of paranoia of Meredith’s original, though it still brought the first half of the gig to a suitably climactic close. The second half included Haze from Meredith’s 2018 album Anno, another juxtaposition of original work and movements from Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, revealing the endless fascination the latter has for so many 21st-century composers. The Ligetis followed it, as on that album, with the “thunderstorm” movement from Vivaldi’s Summer, in which Jones’s arrangement played creatively with Vivaldi’s score, exploiting string techniques Vivaldi could never have imagined. After Tuggemo, the quartet returned for a short encore, their arrangement of Meredith’s most famous track Nautilus, whose juddering rhythms and subversive scale passages sent the substantial crowd out into the night in exhilarated mood.

And yet... it is, I hope, no disrespect to Meredith to say that the work opening the second half of the Ligeti Quartet’s Leadmill gig was music of another order of greatness altogether. Ligeti’s String Quartet no. 1 is from the early 1950s, predating his move from the repressive conformity of Communist Hungary to the relative freedom of the west. Memorably described by fellow Hungarian György Kurtág as “Bartók's seventh string quartet”, it clearly emerges from the same sound world as the earlier composer’s quartets, evident from the first moments in which restless nocturnal rustlings are overlaid with fragments of Hungarian folk music. The Ligetis played it with such conviction, such attention to detail and belief in its quality, that one might not have realised it was the first time they had performed it in public with their new first violin, Freya Goldmark. Music making of this magnificence is rare, whatever the context.