The classical string quartet embodies refinement, intimacy, civilised debate. You might think that minimalism’s refusenik tendencies would reject those associations, but many card-carrying minimalists have turned to the quartet format. Philip Glass alone has written five quartets, spanning his career from the Sixties to the Nineties.
Performing them in a single concert may not be the wisest move but last night the Carducci Quartet played the lot as part of Kings Place’s year-long survey Minimalism Unwrapped. As a set, the quartets are bonier than the fleshier luxuries of Glass’s orchestral music, and the Carduccis’ playing was softer grained than some, but there was no lack of bite. No 1, written in Paris, began as if picking up where Debussy and Ravel left off but soon developed its own blend of Sixties avant-gardism and Glass’s characteristic refusal of tonal development. No 2, derived from music written to accompany a Samuel Beckett staging, proved suitably laconic but from No 3 on textures became thicker, allowing more room for conventional sentiment. Yet the Carduccis’ performance was never indulgent.
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Resist Glass’s music and it can seem banal: at least one person was using the Third Quartet as music to text by. Allow yourself to be swept along by its insistent repetitions, occasional lyricism and undulating rhythmic expansions, and its spell is mesmeric. Most of last night’s audience seemed to feel this was not Glass half full, but Glass overflowing abundantly.
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