KILLED in CARS

Sofia Gubaidulina, Complete String Quartets [Stamic Quartet, 2012; Supraphon]

Czech Stamic Quartet has a respectable curriculum predominantly displaying renditions of romantic classical music, which, as spontaneous practical ideology, or some kind of subliminal performatic slang, could sink atonal-serialist chamber music in regrettable dramatic or fake solemn mood. That would cast the wrong pathos on Guba’s pieces, and the damages would be extensive inasmuch as powered by the Stamics well-lapidate technique. One should bear in mind that an interpretive mistake backed up by limping technique becomes so discernible that can be discarded at first hearing. However, interpretive – and consequently performatic – mistakes backed up by unflawed techniques bear the potential of ‘creating school’, and their poison can be reproduced in time, under different disguises. As an example, one should just take a glimpse at what Kronos Quartet does to Alfred Schnittke’s and Morton Feldman’s works. I will say no more on this.

Fortunately it is not at all what happens between Stamic Quartet and Guba’s compositions, They carried out an efficient epistemological cleansing regarding their overbearing romantic classical music trajectories, and delivered sober, entrails-revealing, gloomy interpretations of Guba’s pieces, whose outcome is the intelligible whispering of all their secrets, which come across the renditions in excruciating detail. It builds up an ambience that is dense and sick (hardly consistent with Guba’s explicit inspirational ‘divine’ epiphanies). Thereby, when humour happens, it is sombre and cadaverous. Avant-classical goth? It may be called so.

To convey the extension of how mutually beneficial were the Stamic Quartet reading and Guba’ notations — according to liner notes — in the recording of her supposedly most complex quartet, number 4, whereby Guba draws on dodecaphony, they used two independently recorded tracks, which were then mixed in a quarter tone shift. All that going on, compositional plus studio piloting factors, melted together along the same rationality, in order to attain the effect intended by Gubaidulina, who assumes that ‘the real rises from the unreal’, and not the other way around. That awkward modality of radical anti-empiricism worked handsomely in the upholstering of Guba’s aesthetic. The latter gets extremely robust and insightful whenever the serialist principles purported by Saint Anton, The Webern – Gubaidulina’s master and mentor – get the upper hand over her religious musings, making her dreams sonically feasible.

The Stamic Quartet’s renditions for Guba’s string quartets are probably setting standards for atonal chamber music in 2012. We can expect either an especially ‘strong’ year for the sub-genre or, most likely, to go downhill fast from here.

This is stunning stuff, which will make a lot of sense in the ears of those fond of chamber works by Béla Bartók and Anton Webern, and is mandatory for Guba freaks like me, as well as to ‘normals’ who ‘try hard’.

docperkins