{TABLE} Quartet in F, Op 74, No 2 ......................... Haydn Quartet No 1 ...................................... Gyorgy Ligeti Quartet in A flat, Op 105 ......................... Dvorak {/TABLE} THE Vogler String Quartet from Germany, a regular visitor to this country under the auspices of the Limerick Music Association, is currently engaged on four concert Irish tour. The Voglers have been among the most adventurous of programmers working for the LMA, and their concert at the Royal Hospital in Donnybrook last night included an opportunity to hear the earlier, less frequently heard and less characteristic of Gyorgy Ligeti's two string quartets.
In the early 1950s, when Ligeti was working on the First Quartet, he was still living in Hungary, composing in the shadow of Bartok and Stravinsky, and had yet to encounter the music of Schoenberg. The quartet's subtitle, Metamorphoses nocturnes, acknowledges an open debt to Bartoks "night music", and yet, even in this early work, the compositional mechanisms of the mature Ligeti can already be found, as also his sense of irony and theatricality. The Vogler's propulsive performance, highly alert to all the Bartok echoes, was rewardingly gutsy and fleet.
The opening Haydn was in general crisp and well mannered, with just occasional intrusions into the performance of a style of expressive lyricism of a later age. The closing Dvorak, by contrast, was something of a wallow, with impulsive temptations of the moment getting priority over any cogency of long term view. It's an approach which guarantees the players will enjoy themselves and the abundance of tuneful writing will always sound characterful. The downside is that it also makes the piece sound tiresomely repetitive and, ultimately, overlong.
