Not so long ago, the Wigmore Hall was a bit of a contemporary music desert. Now it’s a pleasingly regular feature of the schedules, and so a day of concerts was devoted to the abrasive, uncompromising music of the late composer Iannis Xenakis. Two programmes from the Jack Quartet surveyed almost all of Xenakis’s chamber works for strings. A lunchtime concert included a number of solos and duos as well as the first of his string quartets, ST4-1, 080262, from 1962 (one of the first pieces composed with the help of a computer). In the evening, the quartet concentrated on the fiercely intense music from the late 1970s onwards.
Xenakis’s unflinching string writing makes as few concessions to those playing it as it does to its audience, and these performances maintained an astonishingly high standard of execution and concentration. Xenakis’s music always establishes its own expressive parameters; it assumes nothing, and in the quartets Tetras (1983) and Tetora (1990) the Jack Quartet thrillingly conveyed that sense of starting from scratch, of bypassing eight centuries of the western music tradition and instead tapping into something much more untamably ancient.
The savage, stomping chords and squabbling glissandos of the 1978 string trio Ikhoor do seem more overtly atavistic, but the piano quintet Akéa, from 1986, in which the quartet were joined by the poised Pavel Kolesnikov as pianist, comes closer to a conventional dialogue between keyboard and strings. With Xenakis, nothing can be assumed or taken for granted – there’s always a surprise.
