Scelsi: Complete String Quartets and String Trio album review – fine, fiercely committed performances

Giacinto Scelsi died in 1988, aged 83. Virtually unknown for most of his life, his music had been discovered and much of it performed for the first time only in his last 10 years, when his works suddenly became influential on both sides of the Atlantic – American experimentalists such as Alvin Curran, Morton Feldman and Earle Brown were among his admirers, as were the French spectralists, especially Tristan Murail and Claude Vivier. The mystique that surrounded Scelsi added to the allure of his music – a self-taught composer who was born into the Italian nobility, he refused to have his photograph associated with his music and regarded himself as a messenger from another world. His intense later works were often confined to a single chord or pitch that was subjected to microtonal inflections and all manner of textural variation.
As these fine, fiercely committed performances by the Quatuor Molinari demonstrate, Scelsi’s five string quartets and his string trio provide a good sense of the way in which his music developed. While the First Quartet, composed in 1944, is clearly indebted to Schoenberg and Berg, by the time of the trio 14 years later, his music is already pared down, so that each movement centres on a single pitch and the ways in which it may be articulated. After that, each of the subsequent quartets, composed between 1961 and 1984, takes a different approach to creating a unique sound world – specially made metallic mutes in the Second, retuning of the strings in the Fourth, exaggerated vibrato and glissandos in the Fifth. But for all its originality, it’s music that always remains at arm’s length, content to remain very much within its own expressive world: easy to admire, much harder to love.
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