Ligeti: String Quartets / Barber: Adagio

The Keller Quartetts association with ECM has yielded outstanding recordings, among them Bachs Art of the Fugue, Shostakovichs String Quartet No. 15 and works by the ensembles mentor, Gyorgy Kurtag.

This newest release is another remarkable addition to the Budapest-based groups discography; the album bridges musical worlds in a way that would have been difficult to imagine just a few decades ago, as it juxtaposes works by two seeming antipodes of 20th-century music: American romanticist Samuel Barber (1910-81) and post-war Hungarian modernist Gyorgy Ligeti (1923-2006).

Ligetis two string quartets are bracing creations of the 1950s and 60s that like the quartets of his great precursor, Bartok are as mysterious as they are earthy. Between these two works appears the slow movement from Barbers String Quartet of 1936, a slice of tonal terra firma between the restlessly shifting, even dizzying sounds of the Ligeti. Barber later orchestrated this slow movement, turning it into his famous Adagio for Strings a work that, after its premiere by Toscanini in 1938, would serve as musical catharsis for occasions of great mourning. The aesthetic distance between Barber and Ligeti is compressed not only by the passing of time but by the keen interpretive perceptiveness of the Keller Quartett. The group finds common contours in these pieces, spirits that are kindred. Here, the Ligeti has an expressiveness that is moving; the Barber, played with sparing vibrato, sounds strangely unfamiliar, ghostly, unsettling.

The CD booklet for this album includes an insightful essay by Paul Griffiths. Underscoring the startling juxtaposition of the Ligeti and the Barber, he points out that the Romantic tradition was home for Barber, and home was for him a place to cherish. For Ligeti whose father and brother were murdered in Nazi concentration camps, and whose hometown of Budapest was the scene of a Soviet crackdown in 1956, the year he escaped to the West home was a place to leave, whether that home was geographical or musical.