Restrained, elegiac and with an almost therapeutic consistency of pulse, “The Last Days” (the album’s generic title) suggests a combination of commemorative and reconciliatory elements. The commemorative angle concerns both the First Quartet (1985), which Bryars revised at the time of his sister’s death, and Die letzten Tage (“The Last Days”, 1991, for two violins), which takes its title from Karl Kraus’s apocalyptic satire The Last Days of Mankind. The latter composition includes “The Roman Ending”, “The Venetian Beginning” and “The Corinthian Middle”, subtitles that refer, respectively, to Rossini’s ‘perverse’ kiss and make up ending to his opera Otello, the significance of Venice both for that opera and for Bryars’s own Medea, and then the specific passage in Medea where, to quote Bryars himself, the heroine “seeks to find a solution to her conflict with Jason”.
Not that enjoyment of the music in any way relies on the knowledge of these facts, or indeed on anything other than the notes themselves. The first movement starts in unison before exploring further, whereas the effective core of the piece lies – at least for this listener – in the heightened expression of two four-minute “Intermezzos”. Bryars’s mastery of the medium transcends expected limitations (you’d hardly guess this to be the work of just two players), while the two quartets incorporate equal measures of poetry and textural innovation.
The ‘reconciliatory’ axis already referred to concerns the Second Quartet (1990), which attempts to synthesize the various nationalities of the Balanescu’s individual players. Bryars explains his strategy in the booklet but, again, the point is of more academic than musical interest – just as the First Quartet’s intended (but abandoned) ‘seance’ of Ysaye, Vieuxtemps, Hindemith and Schoenberg gives little idea of the work’s actual style. The Second Quartet starts where the First ends, among high harmonics, and incorporates more genuinely fast writing than I’ve heard in Bryars’s previous work. Gently pulsing accompaniments and subtle harmonic development are common to both pieces (with significant major-key episodes in the First Quartet), the First plumbing greater depths than its equally arresting though more outwardly demonstrative successor. I sensed the distant ghost of Parsifal’s Prelude at 9'23'' into the First Quartet, but were I asked to offer a very generalized impression of the ‘sound’ of these pieces, I’d probably suggest a subtle blend of Janacek, Pavel Haas and Philip Glass. Certainly, the mood throughout evokes a quiet communion shared between friends.
The entire programme was taped in the presence of the composer and so, in the absence of any real grounds for criticism (at least on the performance front), I would enthusiastically commend this excellently recorded CD as a prime sampling of Bryars’s patient, ethereal and highly accessible style.
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