The Arditti Quartet have recorded Ligeti’s two numbered quartets before, for Wergo (8/89). This time round they’ve added the tiny but heartfelt Homage to Hilding Rosenberg, and the more substantial but (I presume) very early compositions, Ballad and Dance and Two Pieces. These extras are not of great interest in themselves, but they help to fill out our picture of an important composer’s apprentice years, and the disc as a whole offers a forceful reminder of the excitements engendered by the encounter between one of modern music’s most colourful personalities and the hallowed quartet medium.
The First Quartet (1953-4) is an absorbing portrait of that personality in the process of emerging from its Bartokian cocoon, a brilliantly managed dialogue between strictness and freedom which requires precisely the kind of needle-sharp co-ordination and attention to detail that it receives from these performers. The score is already notable for its precise instructions concerning both mood and technique, and these proliferate to become a virtually continuous verbal commentary in the Second Quartet of 1968. One of Ligeti’s most extreme explorations of Expressionism, this is a drama of gesture as much as of ideas, but in as formally cogent, technically polished an account as this one the music has an unsparing visceral impact that leaves you wondering whether the later Ligeti might not have become a little too mellow for his music’s good. The recordings have just the right degree of spaciousness to project the full charisma of this remarkably imaginative music.'