A truly spectacular recording of more recent work. Yet they are very different I think. Ainsi la nuit is a seven part piece for string quartet, composed in the 1970s by the French composer Henri Dutilleux. In it, he’s experimenting a lot with different ways of sound production, in fact he’s trying as many as he can. Harmonically it is all limited to six notes, focussing on intervals of fifths and major seconds. The result is bewildering, but I find this kind of music very refreshing at times.
Side B contains the frist string quartet by the Hungarian composer György Ligeti. He wrote it in 1953/4 and called it Métamorphoses nocturnes. Ligeti was living in communist Hungary at the time, before he emigrated to Austria. It was a period he later referred to as prehistoric Ligeti (never trust a man that speaks of himself in the third person!). Maybe as a result, this string quartet is very much based on Bartok’s third and fourth. So much so that contemporary composer Kurtág called it Bartok’s seventh string quartet.