John Adams has now composed three works for the St Lawrence Quartet. One is a piece for quartet and orchestra, Absolute Jest, while the others are stand-alone string quartets, the second of which the St Lawrence brought to the Wigmore Hall for its UK premiere.
In fact, String Quartet No 2 turns out to have more in common with the orchestral work than with its numbered predecessor. Beethoven provides the connection: where Absolute Jest mined the late quartets and Seventh Symphony for its thematic material, Adams’ new quartet ransacks two piano works – the A flat major sonata Op 110 and the Diabelli Variations – for the motives that generate its dense, busy textures.
The references are curiously specific and inconsequential at the same time. Two of Adams’ most striking orchestral works of the 1980s, Grand Pianola Music and Harmonielehre, gleefully annexed the harmonies and rhetoric of 19th-century romanticism to create a wonderfully potent language that was all his own; but in the quartet, as in Absolute Jest, the Beethoven borrowings seem doggedly limiting rather than liberating.
Haydn and Janáček provided the bookends for the premiere, with another quartet from Haydn’s Op 20 completing the programme. There was plenty of gutsy intensity in all the performances, but some moments of off-piste intonation too. And if Janáček’s First Quartet, known as the Kreutzer Sonata, had been included to add another link with Beethoven, the allusion to the latter’s violin sonata of that name in the quartet’s third movement is far more subtle and telling than anything in Adams’ much more self-conscious work.
