Arditti Quartet

Each movement commences with 'mesto' (sad, melancholic) played by the viola. Bartók (1881-1945) wrote his last quartet in 1939, in a time of uncertainty. Politically, he had expressed his aversion to Nazism and was forced to flee to America. His Sixth Quartet would not become the crowning glory of his quartet works, but was merely a work of introverted retrospection. 'Mesto', in other words. Alban Berg (1885-1935) wrote his opus 3 in 1909-1910. It is not a romantic early piece, but a skilled and expressively passionate composition. Berg studied composition under Schoenberg until 1911. From the beginning, Berg adopted a resolute attitude to the evolution towards atonality: he followed Schoenberg without abandoning the past. Berg combined late-Romantic expressiveness with expressionist disunity, at the same time making use of the expressive powers of tonality and atonality. In his 'Sechs Bagatellen', written in 1913, Webern took his aphoristic style to the extreme. The musical substance is concentrated to the utmost and each sound is a complete entity in itself. The clarinetist and composer Jörg Widmann (b. 1973, Munich), a pupil of Hans Werner Henze, Wilfried Hiller and Wolfgang Rihm, assimilates the musical developments of the last fifty years and moulds them into new and personal forms with grand emotional gestures. His Third Quartet, composed in 2003, is based on a motif from Robert Schumann's 'Papillons'. The motif is presented quite classically but then overreaches itself in a wild chase packed with hideous sound effects.