6 Moments musicaux Op.44 (1999–2005)

Invocatio [a fragment]

Footfalls … as though someone is coming…

Capriccio

In memoriam Sebök György

… rappel des oiseaux … [study for harmonics]

Les adieux [in the manner of Janácek]

Written for the 2005 Bordeaux International String Quartet Competition, the 6 Moments musicaux are much the most sophisticated of Kurtág’s four scores for the same ensemble. This is not to say that the others (the String Quartet Op.1, the 12 Microludes Op.13 and the Officium breve Op.28) are in any way lacking in refinement – far from it – but, clearly, when writing the Moments musicaux, technique was a more than usually significant consideration in the composer’s mind. Not the least interesting aspect of the work from this point of view is that so much of the material is transformed into unquestionably idiomatic string-quartet music from pieces written for other instruments – notably the Játékok piano pieces but also Zwiegespräch for string quartet and live electronics devised in collaboration with the composer’s son, to whom the Moments musicaux are dedicated.

From the textural point of view, the first movement, Invocatio, is remarkable not so much in the rhythmically convulsive outer sections as    in the very quiet middle: a melody, marked “hoquetus,” passes note by note from instrument to instrument on the point of the bow and another melody, marked “chorale,” alternates between the two violins as the top notes of whispered multi-stopped chords played on the four fingerboards. Similarly short – the Moments musicaux title is presumably intended as an allusion to the brevity of the six pieces rather than as a tribute to Schubert – Footfalls alludes    to a play by Beckett in its title and to a poem by Endre Ady in its subtitle. Musically, it derives from a piano suite written as early as 1943, which presumably explains the presence of the passionate, four-sides and distinctively Hungarian parlando conversation introduced in the middle section and recalled just before the footfalls fade to nothing at the end. The elusive Capriccio (in binary form with the first part repeated) is another study in tracing melodic phrases note-by note through the texture, but this time at speed. A characteristic tribute to a late friend, the Hungarian pianist György Sebök, the fourth movement was originally a piano piece. It becomes a string-quartet item by virtue partly of its expressive if short solo melodic lines and partly its other-worldly cello phrases rising from bottom C into high harmonics and echoed at the end by first and second violins.

Although it is dedicated to Tabea Zimmerman, the hero of …rappel des oiseaux… is surely not the violist. It is the cellist who is twice called on to suggest a ghostly echo of an habanera rhythm and who initiates and sustains in one way or another the repeated notes that remain firmly audible as the other instruments die away at the end. As a beautifully detailed, faintly coloured and evanescent study in birdsong harmonics, however, it allows no one to escape that particularly technical challenge. Les Adieux is a tribute not to Beethoven but, as the subtitle indicates, Janácek, whose manneristic tremolando fifths and aching melodic phrases are recalled from the start. The unheard pulsing rhythms which are requested from viola and cello in the middle, just before a rare passage of cello pizzicato, and again at the end as the violins apply their metal mutes, are characteristic moments of sculpted silence.