Anthony Ritchie (b. 1960)
Melencolia
String Quartet No.1 (1983)
String Quartet No.2 (2003)
String Quartet No.3 (2023)
Jade String Quartet
No recording location or dates given
Rattle RAT-D159 [63]

Back in 2012, intrigued by the title of an orchestral work – A Bugle will do – I requested a review copy of a disc by the New Zealand composer Anthony Ritchie. In the intervening years, another five discs have come my way covering all six symphonies and other orchestral scores by this prolific and impressive composer. There have been collections of chamber music recorded previously – including the String Quartet No.2 included here – but this is the first such disc of Ritchie’s non-orchestral works that I have reviewed.

The three quartets neatly span the bulk of his composing life from the student No.1 of 1983, via No.2 twenty years later and No.3 another two decades on from 2023 when Ritchie was on sabbatical from his teaching role at the University of Otago. The Jade Quartet who perform on this disc were the commissioners of this most recent quartet and their skilled and committed playing reflects an immersion in the sound-world and idiom of the composer. The members of the quartet also play (or played) with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra. The New Zealand based label Rattle have handsomely presented this disc, as they did with recordings of the Symphonies Nos.4 & 5, in a miniature hard-back book form. Curiously, Rattle provide no recording information at all regarding venue(s) or dates which given the care that has gone into the presentation of the music seems an odd omission.  Returning to my reviews of the last two Rattle discs I see that I mentioned a preference for a rather close recording style. This is again the case here with a recording venue that is acoustically neutral to the point of almost being dry. Fortunately, the skilled playing of the Jade Quartet can stand this near forensic attention but the main issue it presents is a diminished dynamic range. For my taste, I feel this recording lacks atmosphere, which is a shame, as Ritchie’s scores are always full of detail and subtle nuance as well as passages of dynamic muscularity. Curious collectors can judge for themselves as the complete performances can be streamed direct from Rattle’s own New Zealand-based website.

This latter muscular quality is certainly on display in the student String Quartet No.1written while Ritchie was studying for a PhD on Bartok in Budapest, Hungary. Unusually, none of the quartets have been allocated an opus number so hard to know exactly how early a score this represents. The uncredited liner note – although Ritchie in the past has written insightfully about his own scores – states that the work; “exhibits influences from both Bartok and post-war avant-garde music”. Certainly, it is very different in tone and style to the later orchestral scores which represented my first encounter with the composer. The form too is unusual – seven movements which set a solo instrument against the remaining three players alternating with three ‘quartet’ movements before a final “four solos” where “each player performs passages from different movements independently of one another”. The liner suggests that there are further extra-musical motivations behind the work symbolising human relationships and community amongst others. To the innocent ear I have to say this interpretation is one that the music alone does not really reveal. Instead, the homage to Bartok in particular is pretty explicit in both musical gestures and performing style. Furthermore, it feels as though the student composer is experimenting with the rigorous demands of four-part writing as well as exploring the potential of textures, harmony and rhythm.  Quite whether the whole work coheres convincingly or whether it remains more of a test-bed for compositional techniques I am not sure.  The fact that the work had to wait 37 years for a first performance suggests that possibly the composer himself felt that this was more of a study piece rather than a fully-formed work.

That said, the performance here by the Jade Quartet – who gave it its second performance in Auckland prior to this recording – is impressively powerful and technically assured. The structure of the work allows each instrument in turn to ‘lead’ the music and it is notable how effectively this is achieved both musically and in terms of the considerable demands the composer makes of each player. After the slightly unusual form of the first quartet, String Quartet No.2 is cast in a more traditional four movement form although the liner again suggests there are a number of extra-musical influences or inspirations that lie behind the written notes. A key ‘source ’is the use of a “magic square”. Again, to quote the liner; “ideas and motifs are derived from a magic square, where the numbers on the square represent musical pitches. The magic square used in this quartet is famously featured in Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut, ‘Melancolia’ (1514)”. This woodcut is reproduced on the cover of the CD book and the disc itself with the magic square showing 16 numbers laid out on a 4 x 4 grid with every horizontal and vertical line and diagonal totalling 34. Again, rather frustratingly the liner goes no further than the quote above to explain how Ritchie used such a square to generate pitches and how they were then used. So to the innocent ear there is no ability to connect what is heard with what compositional mechanisms were deployed.  If Bartok seemed to be a presiding influence over the first quartet then here it is Shostakovich.  The use of obsessive ostinati, impassioned unison melodies over stamping rhythms and bleak rustic dance motifs all suggest a close familiarity with the older composer, but while these influences are clear at the same time Ritchie’s distinctive personal voice is equally apparent. There is a considerable progression from the musical laboratory experimentation of the first quartet and something much more distinctly personal here. The four movements are well balanced – the shortest being the third movement Allegro pesante at 5:11 with the longest the slow movement – Like a Lullaby – placed second at 6:47. The liner suggests this movement is revisiting a theme in Ritchie’s work; the relationship between sleep and death. Certainly, this is a subject that has recurred across several of the orchestral works I have previously reviewed. There is an emotional ambiguity in the work which I find to be an important and intriguing characteristic of Ritchie’s scores. Again, credit is due to the Jade Quartet, who seem wholly immersed and confident with both the technical demands of the work but also with charting a coherent pathway through the musical contrasts and ambivalences it contains.  By date, it appears to sit between the second and third symphonies and it shares with those works complexities of construction and extra-musical motivation that were clearly sources of inspiration for the composer without being explicitly present for the first time listener. The Nevine Quartet who commissioned the work recorded this as part of a collection of chamber ensemble works for Atoll Records. That is another fine and very well played performance, although I do prefer the engineering on that earlier disc to this new one.

Another twenty years has seen Ritchie embrace a compositional voice that he himself has termed ‘naïve’.  This style is perhaps most explicitly expressed in his Symphony No.5 ‘Childhood’ (2020) but as I mentioned in my review of that work, it is important to understand that this does not imply simple or simplistic but rather an attempt to embrace a means of expression that is more direct and communicative. As ever, there are motivations and inspirations that lie ‘behind’ the notes but the result is more immediately comprehensible. String Quartet No.3 was written for the performers on this disc and the five titled movements are more instantly identifiable by those titles; the framing First Dance and Last Dance share melodic material with Heartbeat, Perpetual Motion and Funeral March containing music that unequivocally reflects those titles. The total running time of the third quartet is similar to the second – roughly 21 minutes as compared to 23 for the earlier work reflecting the fact that both these works are able to make the diverse musical points and arguments in each movement with focus and concision.  Credit is due, too, to the performers here for very clearly delineating the contrasting style and character of each movement. Once again, I felt that the close engineering militated against some of the more elusive elements of the two central movements. 

These are three very strongly differentiated works although there is a clear sense of a composer evolving both technically and expressively across the forty years represented here. If I say I personally enjoyed the latest work more that is in no way to be critical of the earlier works, just simply that I find I engage most with the direct emotional clarity of the recent quartet. This is a valuable disc of music by a consistently impressive composer.

Nick Barnard