This is the same title as I already wrote about last year. I’m pretty sure I paid a lot more for this one than for the previous record. In the previous article about this recording I focussed on the Cage quartet from 1949. This time I’d like to draw more attention to Lutosławski’s quartet from 1964.
The liner notes draw my attention to the comparison between these avant-garde works. Both composers share a dubious relationship with the genre of the string quartet. After the war everything needed to be different, the old ways are no longer working, so why are we still using such an old form? But like the symphony, it never really goes away, and composers compete for the best in the genre.
Where Cage came from an era of serialism, basing his musical ideas on the concept of music as a series of pitches and rhythmic elements, Lutosławski’s quartet is more shifty, allowing freedom to all individual players. In Lutosławski’s quartet the players only synchronise at certain moments, while John Cage lets his players almost act as a single entity.
According to his own program notes, Lutosławski used chance elements, but also keep a tight control over the music: It employs the element of chance for the purpose of rhythmic and expressive enrichment of the music without limiting in the least the full ability of the composer to determine the definitive form of the work. It is one of the most performed quartets from the post-war era.