Boris Blacher - Streichquartette (Petersen Quartett)

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Boris Blacher - Streichquartette (Petersen Quartett)

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Boris Blacher's five String Quartets provide a good testimony of his compositional development.Scholars - following Blacher himself - consider that his personal signature is the invention of the so-called "variable meter" which he experimented from the early 1950s on, e.g., the organization of the rhythmic architecture using regular progressions of the metrical signatures (or number of beats per measure), following simple arithmetic or more complex geometric rules. But I don't find those "kitchen matters" so important. What matters are the results, not the processes. It is true that the rhythmic aspect is always important in the music of Blacher, and as early as his first Quartet (1930), which pre-dates the systematic organization of rhythm by some thirty years. It is dynamic and forward-moving, even jazzy-fugal in its last movement - Berlin in the 1920s. The music is expressionistic and tense. Blacher likes the dramatic crescendo over the long span. He also favors the ostinato in the slow movements - a lasting feature of his compositional outlook which, in the 2nd Quartet in particular, evokes even Kurt Weill (for those who know Weill's two Symphonies). The Quartet is highly canonical and contrapuntal, in conformity with the composer's Austro-German musical upbringing. Hindemith comes to mind more than, say, Bartok or Schoenberg. The Quartet was lost and miraculously retrieved in the early 1970s, when the parts were found in the estate of the copyist to whom they had been entrusted forty years earlier and who was unable to complete the job, the publisher (Jewish) having been clever enough to sense dire times ahead, close down and emigrate. Berlin in the 1930s.
Those features are still in evidence in the 2nd and 3rd Quartets from 1940 and 1944, with an added rhythmic vigor, dynamism and boisterousness that, on a blind test, would have made me think of an American composer, like Schuman or Piston or maybe a slightly more angular Villa Lobos, and also an intense lyricism in the slow movements that I find even more remarkable than in the First Quartet. Two notable features of the Third Quartet are also the brevity of its movements, and the fact that after what you'd think was the finale comes an enigmatic fourth movement, larghetto. The two Quartets may not be ground-breaking, but they are superb works nonetheless.
The 4th Quartet dates from 1951 and is subtitled "Epitaph - To the memory of Franz Kafka". It is a short movement, brooding and questioning ostinatos interrupted by brief outbursts of furious revolt or seemingly ironic pizzicatos.
The 5th Quartet is a much later work (1967) and it is remarkable in its freedom and tonal invention. It is in fact a theme and 14 short variations followed by a coda, with a duration, here, of a little over 17 minutes. Not a theme in the traditional sense, mind you. The composition's full title is "Variations on a diverging triadic chord in C-minor". The triad is whispered sul ponticello, eliciting an eerie and mysterious atmosphere, and that basic theme provides indeed more an atmosphere or color than the traditional a melodic cell from which the variations will unfold. What follows are 14 short and remarkable variations, some fleeting and rhythmical, some others highly very lyrical, and always with great coloristic invention. Again, there is nothing ground-breaking or aggressively modern - Blacher appears to be beyond theses concerns and categories, but it is all wonderfully evocative and taking.

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