Quatuor Diotima Celebrates Boulez Centenary

Pierre Boulez working with the members of Quatuor Diotima in 2010 (photograph by Gravrand Marion, courtesy of PENTATONE)

This coming Friday PENTATONE will release its latest album of music performed by Quatuor Diotima. The members of this ensemble are violinists Yun-Peng Zhao and Léo Marillier, Franck Chevalier on viola, and cellist Alexis Descharmes. In the past they have recorded quartet music by György Ligeti and Anton Bruckner, and the new album is devoted entirely to the “Livre pour quatuor” composed by Pierre Boulez.

This new release was clearly timed to celebrate the centenary of that composer’s birth on March 26, 1925. He composed the quartet between 1948 and 1949 at a time when he was forging his own path into serial techniques inspired by the Second Viennese School of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. It was structured in six movements; but, when it was first performed by the Arditti Quartet at the end of March of 1985, the fourth movement was not included in the performance. That movement would only be completed after the Boulez’ death when, in 2018, composer Philippe Manoury worked with Jean-Louis Leleu to prepare an entire performing version. The new Diotima album provides the world premiere of “Livre pour quatuor” in its entirety.

As an undergraduate majoring in mathematics, I took an enthusiastic interest in the serial techniques of the Second Viennese School, which were grounded in the field of combinatorics. Accounting for why the pitch class of every note was where it was came to be an engaging pastime. Listening to the disposition of those pitch classes on score pages was another matter. Ultimately, I reconciled myself to the hard truth that an elegant mathematical construct did not necessarily make for an engaging listening experience.

This may have been due, in some part, to my hanging out with music majors at Boston University. I remember a bull session in which we were discussing different approaches to atonality. I would often interject with the ways in which those approaches were grounded in combinatory analysis. On one occasion one of the music students burst out, “You want to know what will be the future of music? TRIADS!” It was only a few weeks later that I first encountered the music of Philip Glass!

Now I am back to thinking about Boulez again, after recently listening to his piano music on Tamara Stefanovich’s Organized Delirium album. It may not be like “noodle soup going down the drain” (the way a New York Times reviewer once described a piece by Morton Feldman); but each of the individual movements comes across as (in the words of Wozzeck in Alban Berg’s opera) “one thing after the other.” Mind you, the Diotima players clearly do their best to bring expressiveness to the “marks on paper;” but there is only so much an attentive listener can take before bursting out “Enough already!”