(Barbican)
Dudok Quartet: Abandoned Voices
Published – 17.10.2024
The Dudok Quartet are a group that firmly believe in the philosophy that music shouldn’t be seen as old or new, ‘but always relevant and present’. This desire that, however deep the caverns of musical history they may be exploring, the performance remains fresh is aptly demonstrated in their opening piece: ‘Deh come invan sospiro’ from the Sixth Book of Madrigals by Carlo Gesualdo (1566–1613). Here, the Dudok carve out new ways of bringing to life the vocal work originally published in 1611, transforming its heightened lines and harmonies in a way that simultaneously honours with integrity of the original, while also offering it a new life fit for the 21st-century. ‘Oh, how I sigh in vain,’ we hear the strings translate; ‘ah, how in vain I gaze at you, because, you make everyone rejoice and for me alone to die! My unfortunate fate, may life become death for me.’ The text, which was penned by an anonymous writer, gave Gesualdo – and in turn, the quartet – a deep well of pathos from which to draw. And the composer’s famously complex and inventive harmonies are heard in all their chromatic glory in this arrangement, meaning that the madrigal loses none of its emotional anguish when you remove the words. It is embedded deeply, like a wound, into the fabric of the music itself.
From here to the present day, with the UK premiere of Three Tributes for string quartet and tape, the new work by Bushra El-Turk (born 1982), commissioned for the Dudok Quartet by the Borletti-Buitoni Trust, String Quartet Biennale Amsterdam and West Cork Chamber Music Festival. In it the composer paints portraits of Levantine female singers who lived and worked and sang during the Nahda period. This was a ‘cultural and intellectual movement that flourished in many parts of the Middle East throughout the late 19th century to the early 20th century’; El-Turk discovered the singers via rare archival 78rpm recordings, and, inspired by their musical and historical stories, created Three Tributes to celebrate their tradition and memories. The inclusion of tape creates an interesting thread with the next piece, too: Messaien’s Oraison.
Olivier Messiaen (1908–92) never wrote for string quartet – perhaps the closest he got was in his famous Quartet for the End of Time for clarinet, violin, cello and piano, composed for the instruments available to him while a prisoner of war in Stalag VIII-A in 1941. A few years prior, in 1937, Messiaen created Oraison for the early electronic instrument the ondes Martenot, an instrument whose unique colours fascinated him, and to which he returned most famously in his TurangalîlaSymphonie. To listen to Oraison is a deeply otherworldly experience, at times seeming to possess the clarity of a single line, at others like an all-engulfing soundscape.
The Dudok Quartet set themselves quite a challenge in reworking Oraison for string instruments, particularly considering the work it takes to extract four voices from a composition meant for just one. There are, of course, the ondes Martenot’s overtones and harmonics to exploit, but it is a singular ensemble that takes on such a challenge. But this is typical of the Dudok Quartet, whose complex and carefully constructed programmes invariably yield things you have never heard before. That you’ve never thought to hear before. Their concerts are built like plays: with a narrative structure, but within that, an unselfconscious ambiguity, so you might walk away feeling entirely different from the person sitting next to you. What you take from Oraison: how you navigate its web of musical material is up to you.
We end with Schubert, and here there’s another link back to the Gesualdo with which the concert began, for life, as Gesualdo surmised, does indeed become death. The despair of his madrigal is balanced by the equally devastating moods of Schubert’s 14th String Quartet, Death and the Maiden. Conceived of and written in 1824, while the composer grappled with the syphilis that would lead to his own death four years later, the quartet’s name comes from an earlier song in which a young girl begs Death not to take her, for she has more life to live. In the song, Death itself gets the final word: ‘I am not cruel,’ he declares ‘you shall sleep gently in my arms.’ Dealing with his own failing health, Schubert creates a quartet that is in turn moving, sombre, chaotic, faltering and calm. Those themes that we face in all our human lives – uncertainty, heartbreak, grief are stretched out, map-like – the quartet intrepid cartographers of emotion.
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