A Dark Flaring: Works for String Quartet from South Africa
Signum Quartett
rec. 2022, Sendesaal, Bremen, Germany
Reviewed from a WAV download 44.1 kHz/16-bit
ECM 2787 [82]
Through now’s incessant numbness
Flickers a glint,
A startling glimmer,
A dark flaring…
Here is one of those revelatory albums that open up a path of discovery. In this case music spanning a period of 80 years written for string quartet by composers born in South Africa. One of them, Robert Fokkens, provided the short poem above as a key to his own contribution, Glimpses of a half-forgotten future. It is not surprising though that ECM used the last line as the title for the album as a whole. Finding consolation amidst pain, keeping an inner light lit, is one of the defining characteristics of all of the pieces here. Necessarily perhaps, all of the works the Signum Quartet have chosen are also infused with a sense for the past and an inchoate vision of the future – imaginings wrought with varying degrees of hope. It’s fascinating to see the variety of forms adopted and listen to what those forms exhibit.
The first work on the album, Komeng, by the Soweto born Mokale Koapeng has a very tactile grip on musical ancestry. Its genesis came as part of an influential wider project by New Music South Africa centred on the music of an earlier South African composer, Nofinishi Dywili. Koapeng uses one of her songs, Umyeyezelo (“ululation”) as inspiration, originally written to mark the completion of Ulwaluko, the Xhosa ritual which marks initiation into manhood. Koapeng’s piece unfolds with a pervading feeling of sadness and poignancy but one which also has a rhapsodic touch to it: as in Dywili’s song, the days of boyhood now gone, remembered, what’s to come looked to with trepidation perhaps but also wonder and optimism. Koapeng’s treatment of the material and the Signum’s realisation of it, is breathtaking at times. I particularly loved their exquisite touch at the understated but emphatically rhythmical opening and the use of col legno to evoke the sound of the uhadi (a single-stringed musical bow with a resonator attached) an instrument of which Dywili was an acclaimed practitioner.
Matthijs van Dijk’s composition (rage) rage against the provides a very marked, indeed almost ferocious, contrast with Koapeng’s gentleness. It was written with his mother Susi in mind, who died while Matthijs was still in his teens, and its inspirations and influences include not just the Dylan Thomas poem which provides the work’s title, but also the band Rage Against the Machine. It’s a heady and almost bewildering mix with a detonative power. The Signum Quartet propel us through it with consistent attack which has a superbly mediated aspect of savagery to it too – virtuosic, scary and thought provoking.
Arnold van Wyk was the first South African composer to study at the Royal Academy of Music, arriving there on a scholarship at the advent of World War Two. His Five Elegies for String Quartet was written at one of the worst periods of bombing London endured and the work is permeated with an air of desolation, occasionally snapping into something angrier, not least in the Bartókian second movement Allegro feroce. It was played at the famous wartime National Gallery concert series, and I would love to know what the audience there thought of it. It receives a perfectly judged performance here with the differences between the movements keenly and intelligently accentuated. Despite the committed advocacy of the playing though, of all the pieces on the disc this does feel the most derivative, certainly the most dated.
Like his son Matthijs, Péter van Dijk chose a song as inspiration for his piece iinyembezi. If I tell you that ‘iinyembezi’ is the Xhosa word for ‘tears’ you might possibly guess that Péter went further back in musical history to Dowland’s Flow My Tears as his starting point. In fact, iinyembezi is an ingenious set of variations based on the first four descending notes of Dowland’s song, using a variety of moods and techniques to explore the musical and aesthetical possibilities the original offers, very much infused with a sense of the present. There are some striking effects, such as the percussive use of the bodies of some of the instruments and the evocation of a Mbira (‘African thumb piano’), but the more ‘traditional’ quartet writing too is very affecting. We are never far from Dowland’s bittersweet melancholy and when the complete melody of the original sings through at the end the effect is overwhelming. I was struck by the restraint of the Signum Quartet’s playing here, which only adds to the impact, where something more obviously impassioned might have felt crude or melodramatic.
Glimpses of a half-forgotten future is a beautifully elegiac three movement composition by Robert Fokkens, who some generations later than van Wyk also studied at the Royal Academy, and is now a lecturer at Cardiff University. The uhadi’s influence features in this piece too, whose narrative it feels to me goes from bewilderment at the unsettling nature of some unnamed grief in the first movement to a more active representation of disturbance in the second to perhaps something close to acceptance in the third. It was written for the Carducci Quartet, who were in residence at Cardiff University, but the Signum Quartet have since become the work’s champions, playing it worldwide before this recording. As you might expect, it sounds as if they know this work inside out and the insight, tenderness and devotion they bring to their performance is enthralling.
Priaulx Rainier was another South African who made the journey to the Royal Academy, where she was Professor of Composition. Her Quartet for Strings from 1939, contemporaneous with van Wyk’s Elegies, is an altogether more challenging and original work. Interestingly it was recorded by the Amadeus Quartet for Decca in 1951. Seventy years on, in the hands of the Signum Quartet it still sounds forward looking, in some elements to minimalism, but also in its exactitude like an interesting and individual view of what a modernist chamber work should sound like. I thought the Signum’s performance here was precise, open-hearted and mesmerising, a fine conclusion to an important album.
I strongly urge you to seek out this release if you are interested in the string quartet and/or the meeting of cultural traditions. It’s been a profoundly refreshing and educative experience. If I was a little lukewarm about van Wyk’s contribution I should stress that was relative against my wholehearted enthusiasm for the other works on the disc and I am still very glad to have heard it. Huge credit must go to the Signum Quartet for their curation of this disc and the consistent excellence of the performances over a range of styles and influences. As you might expect, ECM have provided them with first class recorded sound. I must finally call out the absolutely superb booklet notes from Shirley Apthorp. Beautifully written, highly informative, they made an enormous qualitative difference to my appreciation of the album.
Dominic Hartley
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Contents
Mokale Koapeng (b. 1963)
Komeng (2002)
Matthijs van Dijk (b. 1983)
(rage) rage against the (2018)
Arnold van Wyk (1916-1983)
Five Elegies for String Quartet (1940-41)
Péter Louis van Dijk (b. 1953)
Iinyembezi (2000)
Robert Fokkens (b. 1975)
Glimpses of a half-forgotten future (2012)
Priaulx Rainier (1903-1986)
Quartet for Strings (1939)
