Arditti String Quartet - Berio - The String Quartets (2002)

After so many benchmark recordings of the music of our time, the members of the Arditti Quartet were bound to give us one day a complete survey of the string quartets of Luciano Berio, the great Commendatore figure who has dominated Italian music since the 1950s. In point of fact, this programme takes in almost the whole career of the composer of Sequenze, from his Quartet no.1 of 1956, still under the influence of serialism, up to the Glosse of 1997 which are, as their title suggests, 'a collection of brief annotations, and at the same time a short dictionary of idiomatic sonic gestures'. In this fully mature work, Berio resolves in magisterial fashion the problem of the search for new instrumental solutions that is characteristic of the fascinating Sincronie (1963-64), an attempt to make the string quartet sound like 'a single homophonic instrument'. The final work in the programme, the Notturno (1993) presents an atmosphere of extreme expressive concentration, in which sound is born of silence (pppp quasi senza suono) and returns there. A whole series of technical and interpretative challenges that the Arditti meet with their usual sovereign mastery.