Takács Quartet - Hough, Dutilleux & Ravel: String Quartets (2023)

If this premiere recording of Stephen Hough’s String Quartet No 1 may be regarded as definitive—the work is dedicated to the Takács Quartet—those of the quartets by Ravel and Dutilleux are no less distinguished.Dedicated ‘à mon cher maître Gabriel Fauré’, Maurice Ravel’s only string quartet was started in 1902. On 30 April that year he had attended the first performance of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande and immediately afterwards set about preparing for the Prix de Rome—a prize he was fated never to win despite repeated attempts between 1900 and 1905. In the autumn he undertook a project for a fellow composer, Frederick Delius, who asked him to make a piano–vocal score of the opera Margot la Rouge. He then got to work on the String Quartet, and the first two movements were finished in December 1902, according to Ravel’s note on the last page of the second movement in the autograph score.

The next month, he submitted the first movement for a composition prize at the Paris Conservatoire, where he was still studying with Fauré. The jury was unimpressed and the music drew a typically acidic reaction from the Conservatoire’s director Théodore Dubois, who proclaimed that it lacked simplicity. Even Ravel’s teacher Fauré had initial doubts about the work, though his willingness to give it another chance was a gesture that greatly touched the young Ravel and probably led to the quartet being dedicated to him. The failure of the first movement to win a prize meant that his studies at the Conservatoire were over, and he didn’t return there until several years later—as an examiner.
But Ravel persisted with the String Quartet, and, as the poet Léon-Paul Fargue recalled, he played parts of it on the piano to his friends in Les Apaches, a group of writers, artists and musicians who provided Ravel’s closest artistic circle at the time. By April 1903 he had finished all four movements, then put the work aside for a few months for yet another doomed attempt at the Prix de Rome. During the rest of 1903 it’s likely that he made further revisions to the score. At the time, Ravel was living with his family at 19 boulevard Pereire, in north-west Paris. The pianist and composer Alfredo Casella was living a couple of doors away (at 15 boulevard Pereire), and the two became friends. In his memoirs, Casella recalled finding Ravel on a bench one day, reading through a manuscript. On asking what it was, Ravel told him that it was his new quartet, and that he was rather pleased with it.

Among those present at the final rehearsal was Claude Debussy, whose 1893 quartet was a clear influence on Ravel’s. He wrote on 4 March 1904:

Cher ami,
[Raoul] Bardac has just told me of your intention to have your quartet—and especially the slow movement—played less loudly. In the name of all the gods, and mine, please, don’t do that. Think of the difference in sonority between a hall that’s full and one that’s empty. It’s only the viola that slightly drowns the others and perhaps that could be toned down? Otherwise, don’t touch anything and all will be well.
This letter gave rise to the story that Debussy had told Ravel not to change a thing. In his biography of Ravel, Roger Nichols points out that Debussy’s presence at this rehearsal suggests that the two composers—who had an uneasy friendship—were close at the time, and Debussy evidently understood Ravel’s concerns about the quartet’s textures sounding too orchestral. Nichols summarizes the impact that Debussy had on the work: ‘Being at once homage to and exorcism of Debussy’s influence … the Quartet [is] the work of a newly matured composer, intent on pursuing his individual concerns.’

The premiere was given by the Heymann Quartet on 5 March 1904 at the Schola Cantorum, in one of the concerts of the Société nationale de musique, and it was warmly received by the public. Press reaction, however, was mixed. Pierre Lalo, Ravel’s nemesis among Parisian critics, considered it to be essentially derivative, with ‘an incredible resemblance’ to Debussy’s quartet. Others were much more positive, especially Jean Marnold who declared that Ravel was ‘one of the masters of tomorrow’. Louis Laloy in La Revue musicale wrote that it was ‘the work of a sensitive and gifted musician, full of emotion, clarity and harmony’, while Ravel’s friend and fellow Apache Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi praised its ‘clarity of line’ and ‘balanced architecture’, describing the overall style as ‘at once suave and expressive’.

Years later, in 1928, Ravel told Roland-Manuel: ‘My Quartet in F represents a conception of musical construction, imperfectly realized no doubt, but set out much more precisely than in my earlier compositions.’ In a clear parallel with Debussy’s String Quartet, Ravel makes use of cyclic themes—material heard in the first movement (in sonata form) returns in various guises throughout the rest of the work. The second movement is notable for Ravel’s brilliant use of cross-rhythms and one of the instances of Spanish influence in his music: though there’s nothing in the thematic material itself to suggest Spain, the four string players become a kind of gigantic guitar—using the same technique but producing a very different outcome from Debussy’s plucked strings in the scherzo of his quartet. The slow movement is rhapsodic in feel, and includes a dream-like recollection of the main theme from the first movement. In the finale, the rhythmic drive is made all the more individual through Ravel’s use of irregular time signatures, moving freely from 5/8 to 5/4 and 3/4. This metrical mobility gives the movement a sense of momentum that is not only impossible to predict but also impossible to resist. As with Debussy’s quartet, the use of cyclic form seems entirely effortless, and in the finale Ravel’s recollections of the main theme from the first movement are woven into the texture with the greatest subtlety (though it should be mentioned that this was the movement Fauré considered the least satisfying of the four). The apparent ease with which Ravel handles musical forms, coupled with the kaleidoscopic imagination of his string-writing, produces a conclusion that appears to glitter and surge.

A note by Henri Dutilleux printed in the front of the score of Ainsi la nuit explains how it came to be composed and something about its unusual structure:

Commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation, this work is dedicated to the memory of a friend of the composer, Ernest Sussman, and written in homage to Olga Koussevitzky. The work received its first European performance by the Parrenin Quartet on 6 January 1977; the Juilliard String Quartet presented it for the first time in the United States on 13 April 1978 in the presence of the composer (Library of Congress, Washington).
Ainsi la nuit is divided into seven sections linked for the most part by parentheses, often very short but important because of the organic role which falls upon them. Allusions as to what is to follow—or to what went before—find their place there and are situated in the manner of reference points. Here, as in other works by Henri Dutilleux, the memory concept intervenes, together with everything associated with it (prefigurations, variations, etc.) and this notion implies a particular subdivision of time, and thus of the form adopted. The different titles, including the general title, refer to a certain poetic or spiritual atmosphere but not in any way to an anecdotal idea.
The seven sections are played practically without interruption. However, one important pause is recommended between the third section, ‘Litanies’, and ‘Parenthèse III’.
Dutilleux was a fastidious and fiercely self-critical composer. His patient reflection and exquisite craftsmanship produced highly distinctive music, and while his works are unfettered by doctrinaire theories, they were conceived by a musician with an endlessly inquiring intellect and a phenomenally subtle ear for musical colour and harmony. Asked in 2010 which pieces of music he would take to a desert island, Dutilleux chose Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (a work also beloved by Messiaen and Boulez), but his other choice was Beethoven’s late quartets: ‘They didn’t move me right away. It took some time before I understood what a revelation they were to me, what they represent in the history of music.’ They were certainly to prove a fertile source of inspiration when Dutilleux began work on Ainsi la nuit in 1973. So, too, were several twentieth-century works, including Bartók’s quartets, Berg’s Lyric Suite and Webern’s tiny, crystalline Bagatelles, Op 9.

According to Dutilleux, he began work on Ainsi la nuit with a group of short studies in sonority, ‘each dealing with the various kinds of string sound: one study in pizzicato, others in harmonics, dynamics, contrasts, opposition of register and so on’. Other musical factors help to bind the work together, particularly its first chord, which is made up of perfect fifths, superimposed on each other. This chord returns in various guises throughout the quartet. Dutilleux also delights in playing with musical structures: he told Roger Nichols that ‘in the movement called “Miroir d’espace” there’s a perfect palindrome, not only from the point of view of pitch but for durations too. But elsewhere in the work the palindromes are deliberately not exact’. Dutilleux once reflected that ‘you could say there’s no longer any point in writing for string quartet, but that’s really rather a narrow point of view … I think the medium still offers opportunities to express oneself.’ In Ainsi la nuit, Dutilleux demonstrates that beyond doubt.

Stephen Hough’s String Quartet No 1 was specifically composed as a companion piece to the works by Ravel and Dutilleux on this recording, and it is dedicated to the Takács Quartet. It was first performed at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, California, on 8 December 2021, played by the Takács Quartet. In conceiving his quartet as a piece to be heard alongside Ravel and Dutilleux, Hough writes in the preface to the score that he set out to explore ‘not so much what united their musical languages but what was absent from them’. He explains that the work’s subtitle, Les Six rencontres, ‘has in it a pun and a puzzle: the six movements as an echo of “Les Six”, although there are no quotes or direct references from those composers; and “encounters” which are unspecified, their phantom occurrence leaving only a trace in the memory of the places where the meetings might have taken place’. The significance of the Groupe des Six (Poulenc, Honegger, Milhaud, Auric, Durey and Tailleferre) in the origins of Hough’s quartet lies in something less tangible: for him, their music ‘evokes a flavour more than a style’, and he adds:

It’s a flavour rarely found in the music of Ravel and Dutilleux. In Les Six it’s not so much a lack of seriousness, although seeing life through a burlesque lens is one recurring ingredient; rather it’s an aesthetic re-view of the world after the catastrophe of the Great War. Composers like Poulenc and Milhaud were able to discover poignance in the rough and tumble of daily human life in a way which escaped the fastidiousness of those other two composers.
The composer himself is the surest guide to the substance and mood of each movement. About ‘Au boulevard’, he writes that ‘Stravinskian spikes elbow across the four instruments, with jagged accents, darting arpeggios and bracing white-note harmonies … the main theme is suddenly transformed into technicolor for the central section, blushed with sentiment and exactly half-tempo.’ In ‘Au parc’, ‘under a pizzicato accompaniment a gentle, melancholy melody floats and is passed around the players in a haze of decorative variations’, while ‘À l’hôtel’ opens with ‘a bustling fugato, its short subject incorporating repeated notes, an arpeggio and a scale’ and ends with ‘offbeat, snapping chords in pursuit’. ‘Au théâtre’ reveals a ‘skeleton of a motif [which] dances in a recurring harmonic sequence, decorated with each repetition in more and more lurid colours, smeared with lipstick glissandos’, before a change of mood is ushered in by the viola, ‘pushing the music forward to a splashing climax’, followed by a despairing reprise and a conciliatory close. Hough describes ‘À l’église’ as a ‘serene hymn’ for muted strings, while ‘Au marché’ is a bustling moto perpetuo which recalls earlier material and finally returns to the music from the opening of the work.

Nigel Simeone © 2023

Tracklist
1. String Quartet No 1 'Les Six rencontres': Au boulevard (3:06)
2. String Quartet No 1 'Les Six rencontres': Au parc (3:25)
3. String Quartet No 1 'Les Six rencontres': À l'hôtel (3:47)
4. String Quartet No 1 'Les Six rencontres': Au théâtre (4:40)
5. String Quartet No 1 'Les Six rencontres': À l'église (2:55)
6. String Quartet No 1 'Les Six rencontres': Au marché (4:09)
7. Ainsi la nuit: Libre et souple – Nocturne (3:26)
8. Ainsi la nuit: Parenthèse I – Miroir d'espace (2:11)
9. Ainsi la nuit: Parenthèse II – Litanies (2:54)
10. Ainsi la nuit: Parenthèse III – Litanies II (3:57)
11. Ainsi la nuit: Parenthèse IV – Constellations – Nocturne II (3:12)
12. Ainsi la nuit: Temps suspendu (2:31)
13. String Quartet in F major: Allegro moderato, très doux (7:58)
14. String Quartet in F major: Assez vif, très rythmé (6:10)
15. String Quartet in F major: Très lent (8:01)
16. String Quartet in F major: Vif et agité (5:26)


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