That Stephen Hough intended his string quartet as a tribute to the music of early 20th century France should be apparent to anyone familiar who’s heard the Ravel Quartet or any of the works of Les Six, or even to anyone who reads the titles of each movement of this most recent piece from the pianist and composer. Les Six Rencontres is meant to evoke the mood of each of the locations described in these titles, from the busy bustle of the boulevards, to the leisurely mood of the park, to the tension and sensuality of the theater, to the tranquility of an empty church. Hough is thoughtful in his composition, each movement is clearly a labor of love, true to the mood it’s trying to evoke, rarely deviating from the musical concerns of the period. But therein lies the problem.
The quartet is ultimately lightweight in concept and execution, like any good pastiche should be. Hough’s not plumbing the depths of the human soul here, just trying to evoke what might have been the moods and atmospheres of certain places at a certain time in history. That he chooses to do so using the musical language of that time period makes the work essentially a fun little tribute to the city that created the likes of Milhaud and Franck. So it's a bit obvious then, why Hough intended for it to be paired with the two other quartets on this album, Dutilleux’s Ainsi La Nuit and Ravel’s more famous composition. But does this pairing work as a complement to the other pieces, or against them?
Juxtaposing pastiche against works that stand in a clear relationship of lineage with each other is an odd one, when you think about it. In doing so, one runs the risk of consigning those works to that sort of blithe nostalgia that inspired the tribute, which is to obliviate whatever depth they may have in their own right. Hough’s quartet does of course draw on the musical language of the past, as Dutilleux’s work does, but where Ainsi La Nuit touches on the techniques drawn from the fin de siècle, most prominently the octatonic scales employed liberally by Ravel and Debussy, it still remains a work rooted in modernist concerns with timbre and harmonics, each movement honing in on a particular technique and making it the musical core from which the rest of the movement follows. There is a clear sense of artistic progression from Ainsi La Nuit, a sense of what Dutilleux has drawn from his forebears and what he is expressing from the heart of his own milieu. When it’s placed alongside Houghs’s, one gets the sense that it’s been somehow cheapened, that the piece is being used to further the sense of nostalgic atmosphere Hough’s trying to evoke, rather than being allowed to speak for itself, with its own language.
All this conceptual navelgazing isn’t to say that the Takacs quartet isn’t bringing their all to the pieces in question; indeed, this album only confirms my belief that they are among the absolute best quartets working today. The ease with which they make even the most difficult passages glide by is as impressive as always and the total consonance between the musicians is so unshakable that it’s easy to forget that there are actually four separate minds at work here and not just one. Their interpretive abilities are unparalleled, passages that could easily have come across as stilted or mechanical are planed and smoothed into a natural beauty, without artifice or ostentation. This is perhaps best seen with the Dutilleux quartet, where the quartet shift between frantic, spidery pizzicato and screeching dissonance into whispering, translucent strands of ghostly melody almost effortlessly.
That their interpretation of the Ravel Quartet stands out among the ocean of versions that have been recorded over the past century further testifies to their ability. Here, the quartet has focused on the lyricism and melodic qualities of the piece, the pace is measured and moderate compared to some other recordings, and dynamics are employed for precise emotional impact rather than bluster or drama. The Takacs quartet are doing more than just a run-through of an established favorite. They are asserting their own mastery of mood within a single piece, making clear all obscurity. It’s all made to look easy for a group that was able to do the same with Bartok’s notoriously thorny quartets, and I was left wondering why they had never recorded this quartet until now.
Perhaps, when looking at the Hough quartet, a commentary might be made on the simulacral nature of life today. In a world where the perception of the advancement of art is one of dissipation into ethers of conceptual detachment from all previous understandings of form, simulation sometimes feels like the only way something can be made that is graspable, something that one can relate to on an immediate level. Hough’s attempt to evoke the Paris of a century ago may be more than simple nostalgia for a time period he could have never experienced. Given that the Dutilleux quartet takes much of the language of that period and twists into something that would be almost unrecognizable to the people living in it, and given its central place in the album, it’s possible to read in the Hough quartet something cautionary, something that speaks to the impossibility of ever truly evoking the past without the distorting lens of the contemporary. If Hough had perhaps made that explicit and expanded on it, his tribute to what was unspoken in those previous works might have been more than what it is. But a tribute, by its very nature, can never live up to what it is meant to elevate, and as such, his quartet, as lovely as it is, doesn’t deserve its place alongside the others on this album. But when the music’s as wonderful as it is, when it is being played by such a talented ensemble, it’s easy to forgive whatever conceptual shortcomings the new piece might have. And while the new version of the Ravel quartet may not quite become definitive, the version of the Dutilleux that they have recorded stands above any that I’ve previously listened to, including that of the Juilliard quartet for whom it was composed. So, while this collection of quartets, including the most recent one, will undoubtedly hold something of interest for almost anyone, its conceptual shortcomings make it far from the best thing the Takacs quartet has ever done.
