Arditti Quartet - Conlon Nancarrow: Quartets and Studies (2007)

Any ensemble that takes on transcriptions of Nancarrow's player piano music deserves huge credit for bravery, and if it can pull it off, awestruck admiration. The Arditti Quartet programs both transcriptions of his works for player piano and works originally written for live performers, plus a duet for violin and player piano and a player piano solo. The Arditti, which has set before itself the most daunting musical challenges of the era since its founding in 1974, succeeds beautifully in maintaining the distinctive balancing act between the seeming chaos and systematic rigor Nancarrow demands. This high-wire act is most fear-inducing in Ivar Mikhashoff's arrangement of Study for Player piano No. 15, which sounds perilously close to the verge of spinning out of control, but the players miraculously bring the apparently unrelated lines to a tidy and satisfying cadence. Many of Nancarrow's works are canons, often using stupefyingly complex ratios (such as the square root of two to two) to determine the tempo of the various entries of the subject. His String Quartet No. 3 (1987), one of a handful of works he wrote for live performers rather than for player piano, uses the ratio of three to four to five to six. Each player's ability to maintain independence of tempo while remaining correctly related to the timing of the other three players is simply dazzling. Technical brilliance is not the Arditti's only triumph here; it plays with gorgeously full tone and subtly nuanced phrasing, giving the transcriptions a life they can never have when performed by a mechanical instrument. Nancarrow would have been proud, and probably amazed.