Summer Strings (1962)

One of the few Israeli composers to be regularly performed abroad – his 80th birthday was recently celebrated by concerts not only in Israel but also in Germany, where he was born – Zvi Avni has always been one of the most adventurous. He apparently subscribed to the exotic-nationalist “Mediterranean” style in the 1950s but little evidence of that survives in his official work list. Although he describes Summer Strings, the first of his three string quartets, as “belonging to the Mediterranean phase in my work,” it is actually more progressive than that would suggest. Written for a composers’ seminar at Zichron Yaakov in 1962, it was first performed there by the Israeli String Quartet in June (hence the title no doubt) of that year. It is a sophisticated composition, quasi-serial in construction, ingeniously calculated in rhythm, freely dissonant in harmony and highly resourceful in its often contrapuntal textures.

Much of the thematic material derives from the scurrying semiquaver motif heard on second violin at the beginning of the first movement. A particularly interesting passage in Destination presents the main theme in semiquavers on cello and at the same time in tremolando quavers on second violin and syncopated crotchets in first-violin harmonics. This is just before a central climax marked by percussive 12-note multi-stopped chords on all four instruments. Argument, based on a version of the scurrying theme from the first movement, pits feroce unisons and forceful chords against whispered sonorities produced by the wood of the bow on viola and on the bridge of the violins. Although the louder voices win, something of the rhythms tapped out by the viola seems to survive into the next movement, Variations without a Theme. A rhythmic figure on the cello is taken up in ever shorter note values by each of the other instruments in turn creating a polyrhythmic accretion of ninths before a series of brief “variatons” on dissonant intervals in different textures. Interweaving, a sort of rondo featuring varied repeats of the exchanges between the violins in the opening bars, brilliantly and conclusively recalls material from earlier movements.