The Wigmore Hall never needs much of an excuse for a celebration, and its 115th anniversary has triggered a trio of special concerts. The last of them was given by the Jack Quartet, the new-music specialists who have become Wigmore regulars over the past few years. Though their programme was a typical one, not everything about the pieces in it was new. The more recent pieces were separated with transcriptions of Machaut, Gesualdo and Rodericus by the quartet’s violinists, Christopher Otto and Ari Streisfeld, highly skilled arrangements that brought out the harmonic and rhythmic adventurousness of all three composers.
But despite the astonishing quality of all the performances, the concert seemed curiously insubstantial, until at the very end when a high-definition account of Helmut Lachenmann’s Second Quartet, “Reigen seliger Geister”, added some genuine gritty substance to it all.
The two pieces receiving their UK premieres were, in different ways, very disappointing. John Zorn’s The Remedy of Fortune, first performed by the Jack last year, and designed apparently as “six tableaux depicting the changing fortunes of romantic love” has a quotation from Machaut as its centrepiece, and smuggles other references to his and other composers’ music into rather overwrought textures, but doesn’t begin to do what it claims on the label.
Caroline Shaw’s Ritornello 2.sq.2.j is apparently one manifestation, for string quartet, of an ongoing project. Built entirely out of oscillating tonic and dominant chords, which are interrupted occasionally by scurrying pizzicatos or sul ponticello passages, its only interest comes from finding out how the composer gets out of such a compositional dead end, and the throwaway sequence of pizzicatos that she chooses as an ending is a disappointment too.
