The New York-based Jack Quartet is by no means the first group to perform all of Elliott Carter’s string quartets in a single day – the Pacifica Quartet did so in 2002, bringing their cycle to the Edinburgh festival the following year, and to London in 2004.
Alongside the ongoing series of works by Brian Ferneyhough and Wolfgang Rihm, Carter’s quartets remain the most significant addition to the repertory since Bartók’s, and they still represent a tremendously demanding challenge, musically and technically.
Not that anyone would have sensed that at the Wigmore Hall from the Jack Quartet’s breathtakingly authoritative performances. They had split the five works between lunchtime and evening, pairing the gloriously expansive First Quartet of 1951, one of Carter’s supreme achievements, with the divertissement-like Fifth of 1995 in the first concert. This made the later programme a particularly feisty affair, for the formal intricacies of the Second, Third and Fourth Quartets result in some of the densest, most demanding music Carter ever composed.
But it all emerged with fabulous clarity here, whether in the role-playing of the four instruments – mercurial first violin, stolid second, laconic viola and rhapsodic cello – in the Second, or the swooping emotional trajectory of the Fourth, which moves from the tangled intensity of its opening to a wistful, stuttering coda. But it was the quartet’s performance of the Third that was perhaps the most astonishing. When it was first performed in the 1970s, the players (the Juilliard Quartet) used electronic click tracks to synchronise the two pairs into which Carter divides the four instruments. Here it was played like any other work, without aids yet with perfect ensemble and textural transparency; still not easy music, but devastatingly effective.
